The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/2019-09-14T17:34:54-04:00Copyright 2019 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.tag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-598018<p>One of the great things about living in the future is that you can watch the <i>now</i> as it was supposed to be catch up to the <i>now</i> as it is. Charli XCX has been tagged as a <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/dark-star-rising-charli-xcx-talks-rave-roots-and-her-colorful-future-52620/">pop star of tomorrow since 2012</a>, when early singles by the Brit born Charlotte Emma Aitchison made music bloggers—still a force back then—swoon. The press has <a href="https://twitter.com/Steven_Hyden/status/1171826092090507264">continued to portray her</a> as a next-big-thing as she’s moved from black-lipstick operatics to Blondie-ish pep rallies to anchoring Iggy Azalea’s No. 1 hit “Fancy” to her current phase: catchy noise art.</p><p>Presumably if she was the future in the past, the present is indebted to her work till now. That’s turned out to be true, sort of, but the 27-year-old Charli is influential less as a pioneering celeb than as a behind-the-scenes writer. She co-created hits including Icona Pop’s trembling ball of energy “I Love It,” Selena Gomez’s seesawing “Same Old Love,” and Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello’s current tabloid-tease ballad “Señorita.” There’s a bleating, rat-a-tat quality to her hooks, which allows performers to convey personality in vocal inflection rather than range. Of course this style, such as it can be identified, builds on long-established hitmakers like Max Martin, whom she’s a fan of.</p><p>When people talk about Charli as futuristic, though, they’re not talking about her workaday writing. They’re talking about her brand in relation to the marketplace: like Madonna if she’d never left CBGB, or like someone playing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfG1yyvIIk">Pitchfork Fest</a> but also <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNVjAsOvMOc">Good Morning America</a></em>. They’re also talking about her production choices. Her new album, <i>Charli</i>, builds on the style of her 2017 mixtapes, <i>Number 1 Angel</i> and <i>Pop 2</i>, which took all the buzz about her as a visionary and converted it into an explicitly “futuristic” aesthetic—chipperly artificial, digital, distorted. The related visuals have her <a href="http://press.atlanticrecords.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Charli-XCX-2099-lrg.jpg">plastic-wrapped, or gel-coated</a>. Often it sounds like she’s trapped in glitching Bluetooth frequency, or that she thinks the next great single will be in the form of an iPhone notification sound.</p><div class="oembed" data-oembed-name="www.youtube.com" data-oembed-src="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chSZCtLrgz8"><iframe allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen="true" class="embedly-embed" frameborder="0" height="480" scrolling="no" src="https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FchSZCtLrgz8%3Ffeature%3Doembed&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DchSZCtLrgz8&amp;image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FchSZCtLrgz8%2Fhqdefault.jpg&amp;key=e59abcd3fdf14abe95641518e479f5c0&amp;type=text%2Fhtml&amp;schema=youtube" width="854"></iframe></div><p>This sonic-hologram approach owes much to the U.K. collective called PC Music, led by A. G. Cook, who’s now Charli’s “<a href="https://www.residentadvisor.net/dj/agcook">creative director</a>.” Back around 2015, PC Music’s outrageous dance tracks—jagged but irrepressible, sugary like ant poison—attracted acclaim as, say it again, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/03/pc-music-at-sxsw-and-the-gloriously-tacky-future-of-music/388478/?utm_source=feed">the future of pop</a>. The time since then has seen mixed success at making that hype a reality. The PC Music ally Sophie, for example, put out one of the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/1857/11/23-best-albums-2018/577792/?preview=HXtlmxkU82N4R1ZAVC8pdAP9H4U&amp;utm_source=feed">best albums of 2018</a>, but her work with Madonna and Vince Staples hasn’t exactly slayed the charts. When the 2015 Sophie-produced Charli XCX single “Vroom Vroom” went <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/suono-originale-6534307811755561984">big on TikTok</a>, it was like a prophecy fulfilled: The tune had captured the attention-strained, jokey, energy-drink vibe of that platform before it even existed.</p><p>PC Music’s work, in fact, usually reads as satire of the desperation and false cheer that rule tech-pop culture. Its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzWSmlH40-A">best songs</a> are the ones in which humankind seems endangered, its voices trapped in a ZIP file while eager-to-please Siri-like bots take their place. The collective’s <a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/2918475/carly-rae-jepsen-joins-pc-musics-pop-universe/">collaborations</a> with<strong> </strong>flesh-and-blood<strong> </strong>singers like Carly Rae Jepsen thus sometimes feel wrong: You’re not sure who the joke’s on. The sardonic Charli XCX makes for a better team member; she’s game for her pouty voice to be treated less as an instrument than as a sample. Still, the tension between songwriterly communication and sonic mischief can be awkward. She never lands a square triumph of a song on <em>Charli</em>, though she gets close enough that the <i>interesting</i> factor makes up for it.</p><p>The album starts jarringly with “Next Level Charli” issuing a monotonous rallying cry for some species that has less-sensitive ears than our own. It features the signature Charli/Cook ingredients—video-poker synths over a simple beat with warbly and watery vocals—but every knob is turned so high that what’s conjured is the after-party migraine rather than the pre-party adrenaline rush. Luckily, Charli follows with “Gone,” an agreeably swirling anthem about that very <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/1857/11/justin-bieber-ed-sheeran-i-dont-care-song-review/589204/?preview=57hi93P-1MVtoYnIIl_SsTvVn4g&amp;utm_source=feed">2019 sentiment</a> of hating the party you’re at. The bridge goes bonkers in the style of Aphex Twin, but the biggest breakthrough is in the fun, lyrical mouthfeel: “They’re making me <i>lo-oa—oathe</i>,” Charli and the guest frontwoman of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/09/christine-and-the-queens-chris/570931/?utm_source=feed">Christine and the Queens</a> croon.</p><p><em>Charli</em> continues in much the same alternating fashion, with gnarly explorations sidling next to swings at the radio, all while a cast of trendy alt-pop guests rotate in. Neither the normcore nor the hardcore fare has a monopoly on the album’s highlights or lowlights. One commercial play, the cartoonish nostalgia binge “1999,” is too crass and jingly to tolerate, though Troye Sivan’s bridge about Jonathan Taylor Thomas is inspired. Another centrist single, the Lizzo-featuring “Blame It on Your Love,” reworks a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj6dwEBmBJA">2017 experimental ballad</a> using dancehall rhythms and warm chords likely drawn up by the super-producer Stargate. It deserves prime party placement.</p><p>The weirder songs deliver the thrill of dropping the listener in an odd neighborhood that, despite initial appearances, actually turns out to be welcoming. In “Shake It,” a quartet of femme rappers provide an overdue answer to the Ying Yang Twins’ “Wait (The Whisper Song).” Between choruses, Charli comes off like a poltergeist with an ASMR podcast.<strong> </strong>What’s not to love? Other standouts like “Thoughts” and “February 2017” place moving narratives and sticky melodies into an ever-melting, up-becomes-down-becomes-up production context. Once you unlock the core concept of these songs, they’re all the more enjoyable for the effort.</p><p>Will radio eventually sound like these Philip K. Dick swarms? It already does to some extent, but less because of Charli or PC Music’s efforts than because hip-hop has <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/missy-elliott-iconography-ep-review-solid-vma-teaser/596821/?utm_source=feed">long pushed</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/08/frank-ocean-blond-blonde-review-endless-time/496985/?utm_source=feed">toward a</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/09/post-malone-hollywoods-bleeding-album-review-foggy/597655/?utm_source=feed">cyborg art form</a>. Really Charli is just playing with “the future” as a decades-old sci-fi aesthetic while enacting some of the inclusive ideals of utopian dreamers. What’s refreshing in a world of cynical songcraft is that Charli’s actually <i>not</i> trying to reverse engineer music’s next phase. She’s just playfully panning for that same treasure that bankrolls pop in all eras: novelty.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/IyAQ7UWLkhE" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Spencer Kornhaberhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/spencer-kornhaber/?utm_source=feedMarcus Cooper / Atlantic RecordsCharli XCX is game for her pouty voice to be treated less as an instrument than as a sample.Charli XCX Is Probably Not the Future of Pop, and That’s Okay2019-09-14T07:00:00-04:002019-09-14T15:58:11-04:00The songwriter’s cybernetic new album, <em>Charli</em>, is a complement to the mainstream, not an invasion of it.https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/09/charli-xcx-charli-album-review-playful-not-visionary/598018/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-598012<p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">Memphis, Tennessee, is known for lots of things: Elvis Presley and B. B. King, the blues and barbecue. All these things, and more. But not Grizzly bears.</p><p dir="ltr">I did not think much of this while on holiday from London when my wife and I escaped the city’s steaming, unbearable heat to look through the Memphis Grizzlies’ (gloriously air-conditioned) fan store. The Grizzlies are the city’s professional basketball team. Their mascot is Griz the Grizzly Bear. Their crest is a Grizzly bear. It’s all about the bear.</p><p dir="ltr">Puzzlingly, in one corner of the store were shirts and other merchandise for a team called the Vancouver Grizzlies—one whose name made much more sense. In fact, the two teams were the same franchise, which in 2001 relocated 1,900 miles, across an international border and three time zones. Vancouver had not been able to support a professional basketball team, so the Grizzlies left for Tennessee. This is not unique in American sports—even in Tennessee. In 1997, American football’s Houston Oilers moved to Nashville, where they played, incongruously, as the Tennessee Oilers before becoming the Tennessee Titans. The most absurd example remains the Jazz: a perfect name for a basketball team from New Orleans, where it was based; less so from Utah, where it now resides.</p><p dir="ltr">As we returned to Britain, the annual soccer-transfer frenzy was reaching its usual fever pitch. Would Neymar Jr., the Brazilian superstar, move back to Barcelona from Paris Saint-Germain? How much would he cost—$200 million? More? At the same time, two small but famous clubs in England, Bury F.C. and Bolton Wanderers, were—like the Vancouver Grizzlies—facing the end of the road. They were losing money and could not find a buyer. Yet this did not mean relocating to a different city, but the prospect of bankruptcy and ejection. The contrast between American and European professional sports could not be more stark. In the United States, teams live on, just in a new location, and failure offers the opportunity for a reprieve. In the brutal world of European soccer, strength and success are rewarded, weakness punished.</p><p dir="ltr">In sports, the U.S. and Europe are different worlds, each revealing wider truths about the societies in which they operate—though perhaps not the ones the casual observer might assume.</p><p dir="ltr">Europe is oft-seen, and derided, across the Atlantic as America’s technocratic mother continent where collectivism and do-goodery reign. Yet it has developed a soccer model that is a form of hyper-capitalism, in which the strongest teams are businesses that live and die on their ability to win. Those at the top grab enormous amounts of prize money, allowing them to secure the best players on the best wages. The three <a href="https://www.forbes.com/athletes/#88f5fe755ae5">highest-earning sports stars</a> in the world this year are all soccer players: Lional Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Neymar, who each earn more than $100 million a year.</p><p dir="ltr">In European soccer, there is no salary cap or overall spending cap; players are traded as commodities—literally forming a part of the business’s balance sheet. You “buy” players in Europe; you do not trade them. Those clubs that spend too much go bankrupt. Those that fail competitively, finishing in the bottom few positions in the league, are relegated, removed entirely from the top tier and forced to play with another, lower echelon before they prove themselves worthy of returning. (This holds true for Europe’s elite too. If they do not perform well enough, even for just one season, they cannot compete in the Continent’s preeminent competition: the Champions League, a contest open only to the teams that finish near the top of their domestic league.)</p><p dir="ltr">The United States, by contrast, holds a reputation in large parts of Europe as the epitome of winner-takes-all capitalism, yet it operates variants of a proto-socialist model for all of its major sports. Success is hailed, yet curtailed, and failure rewarded: The worst-placed teams get the first pick in the following season’s draft of new players, allowing them to restock on talent, a form of redistribution rejected elsewhere in the American economy. There is no relegation for those who finish last. Salary caps ensure something of a level playing field each year, and rules are collectively agreed upon by the franchises. There is even, in some cases, a salary floor to ensure that clubs remain competitive.</p><p dir="ltr">If American and European sports leagues were politicians, Europe would be Donald Trump, and the U.S. would be Bernie Sanders.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">American sports are not so because they like socialism—they are simply taking the best path to making money.</p><p dir="ltr">“In the U.S., they figured out earlier that a league is more profitable if people work together,” Gabriele Marcotti, a senior soccer writer at the sports broadcaster and news site ESPN, told me. “League owners are business partners.”</p><p dir="ltr">While American sports are collectivist in structure—competition controlled, talent and money redistributed—they remain deeply, <em>exceptionally</em> American. Basketball, football, and baseball were created in the United States, designed for the United States, and packaged for the United States. They cater to American sensibilities—for television and commercial breaks, cheerleaders and half-time shows, and are designed to be consumed, competing not with other leagues offering the same product, but with Hollywood and prime-time TV.</p><p dir="ltr">That they should want to make money is also less controversial in the United States. The Chicago White Sox, for example, signed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/sports/baseball/11sox.html">a contract</a> in 2006 to change the start time of their baseball games to 7:11 p.m. as part of a sponsorship deal with the convenience-store chain 7-Eleven. In Europe this would be sacrilege.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/us-womens-soccer-victory-tour-equal-pay/595417/?utm_source=feed">Read: What the U.S. women’s soccer team needs more than equal pay</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Fundamentally, U.S. sports reveal something that is as true in world affairs as anything else: American exceptionalism. The United States can—and does—do things in the world that others cannot. Its size, wealth, and geography simply make it so.</p><p dir="ltr">Look at how American sports were born. There were no other leagues to compete with—they were American sports, not global sports. This gave the organizers more control to shape the way the leagues were run than is the case in soccer, which is buffeted by worldwide, competitive forces. In sports, as in life, the U.S. is big enough and different enough to play its own games, by its own rules. The rest of the world cannot.</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">Soccer, Europe’s dominant sport, began in an amateur era and regards itself as more than entertainment: something communal, even tribal. Clubs were set up by churches or minority groups, to represent a class or interest, town or region, even political affiliation and religion. It’s not just about entertainment.</p><p dir="ltr">A quick visit to any country in Europe illustrates the point. In Glasgow, Scotland, the soccer club Celtic <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/sportscotland/asportingnation/article/0003/">was founded</a> by an Irish Catholic priest with the aim of raising money for a charity set up to alleviate poverty. Its city rivals, Rangers, founded by four brothers in the west end of the city, are traditionally Protestant. Today, Celtic remains <em>the</em> Catholic team—it plays in green and white, and the tricolor of Ireland, a Catholic country, is flown at its games. The Rangers play in blue, and U.K. flags are flown at their games. To wear one jersey or the other in Belfast, across the Irish Sea in Northern Ireland, is almost to indicate which sectarian tribe you belong to. One Catholic friend of mine who grew up in Belfast ruefully recalls the day when, as a child, playing with a Protestant friend, he was punched in the face outside a cinema by a boy in a Celtic top because he was wearing a Rangers tracksuit. His friend’s dad had given the boys the outfits—they were crazy about soccer and too young to care about the team colors.</p><figure class="u-block-center"><img alt="" height="442" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/RTS1ZRYT/7d30ffb13.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">Celtics fans brandish the team colors. (Jason Cairnduff / Reuters)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">There are countless other examples: Lazio in Rome is <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/24/football/lazio-fans-mussolini-banner/index.html">infamous</a> for links to fascism and Mussolini. Livorno, 150 miles up the coast, was where the Italian Communist Party was founded, and its supporters have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/the-gentleman-ultra/2015/sep/23/livorno-serie-a-alternative-club-guide">celebrated</a> Joseph Stalin’s birthday. Russia has teams whose roots go back to divisions in the Soviet era: the people (Spartak), the police (Dynamo), and the army (CSKA). In Spain, clubs represent separatism, monarchy, or class. FC Barcelona’s motto—emblazoned on its stadium, the Camp Nou—is “<em>Més que un club</em>,” or “More than a club.” Despite its globalized brand, FC Barcelona remains a club owned by its supporters and a potent symbol of Catalan identity. In the Basque Country, Athletic Club Bilbao employs only players from the Basque region. Real Madrid—Royal Madrid—is the king’s team, complete with a royal crest (and <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/football/1386832/spainish-government-found-guilty-of-providing-state-aid-to-real-madrid-barcelona-and-five-other-football-clubs/">controversial government financial dealings</a>).</p><p dir="ltr">Perhaps the most striking example is from Austria. In 1909, two Austrian Zionists, Fritz “Beda” Löhner and Ignaz Herman Körner, founded the club Hakoah Vienna to raise funds for Zionism. Hakoah—the name means “strength” in Hebrew—won the Austrian championship in 1925, before touring the U.S. the following year, drawing enormous crowds. In New York City, the club played in front of more than 40,000 fans—the biggest crowd for a soccer game in the U.S. for decades to come.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/income-inequality-explains-decline-youth-sports/574975/?utm_source=feed">Read: American meritocracy is killing youth sports</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">To some extent, the notion that soccer is more than just a sport is a myth Europe tells itself—one based in some truth, but not the whole story. In England, for instance, successful early clubs in Preston, Sunderland, and Birmingham all spent wildly to bring in the best players, the soccer writer Jonathan Wilson told me. Today, soccer clubs’ jerseys are emblazoned with sponsors’ logos, while the owners of one team, Liverpool, are even trying to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-merseyside-49191865/liverpool-fc-can-a-football-club-trademark-its-city-s-name">trademark the city’s name</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">Still, Wilson says, there is a difference between the sporting traditions on either side of the Atlantic. “The idea of sport as a moneymaking tool, a part of the entertainment business, has always underlined U.S. sport,” Wilson said. “Whereas in Europe, there’s a sense of sport as part of the greater good.”</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">Before Memphis, my wife and I spent time in Atlanta. In the Inman Park neighborhood where we stayed, east of the city center, the red-and-black flag of Atlanta United FC was flown at house after house, as often as the Stars and Stripes, and more so even than the flag of the Atlanta Falcons, the city’s American football team. Atlanta United’s average attendance—more than 50,000—puts it at <a href="https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2019/04/16/atlanta-united-attendance-ranked-top-10-world-mls-8th-among-leagues">No. 10</a> in the global-attendance rankings, above some of Europe’s aristocratic giants, such as Italy’s Juventus, Inter Milan, and AC Milan. And yet, Atlanta United did not exist until 2014.</p><p dir="ltr">There are few, if any, equivalent stories in European soccer. In 2004, Wimbledon FC, a team from south London, was relocated to Milton Keynes, a town built in the decades after World War II. The move sparked national headlines and condemnation, and while the club, renamed MK Dons, has since established itself in the third tier of English football, with an average attendance of 9,000, it’s not at all on the scale of Atlanta United.</p><p dir="ltr">Even when well-established but middle-rung teams experience a sudden run of success here, they are disparaged by their more aristocratic brethren. Fans of Liverpool, a dominant club with a decades-long history of success, taunt its upstart rival Manchester City, bought by an Emirati organization in 2008, as lacking the same pedigree. “You can’t buy class,” they shout.</p><figure><img alt="Liverpool's Adam Lallana in action with Manchester City's Gael Clichy." height="469" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/RTX31QZA/8569752d3.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">Liverpool's Adam Lallana with Manchester City's Gael Clichy. (Andrew Yates / Reuters)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">Of course, the United States is not averse to hierarchy and sporting birthright rooted in city and state, but this is reserved for college sports, another exclusively American concept, separate from—and, to some extent, more popular than—the pro leagues. In the American travel writer Paul Theroux’s book <em>Deep South,</em> he reflected on Alabama’s obsession with its dominant college football team, which plays its home games at the 101,821-person-capacity Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa—the eighth-largest sports field in the world and bigger than any soccer stadium in Europe. Game day in Alabama is a statewide event, Theroux wrote; cars carry the italicized <em>A</em> of the team on bumper stickers, and fans have the letter tattooed on their necks.</p><p dir="ltr">“That is a scenario where you have entrenched, historical superpowers,” Marcotti, the ESPN writer, told me of American college sports. “They are good every year, because they recruit the best players. They recruit the best players—and bear in mind they can’t pay them—because they throw other things at them: visibility and status and having great facilities and being in a great conference and being part of the tradition.”</p><hr class="c-section-divider"><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">In sports, the United States operates largely alone, unchallenged. Its sports, professional and amateur, reflect the society in which they have grown; largely separate, it can create its own rules and avoid competition from the rest of the world. Up to a point.</p><p dir="ltr">The U.S. is exceptional—but not entirely so. It may even be becoming less exceptional as the rest of the world becomes more American, and the U.S. becomes more like the rest of the world.</p><p dir="ltr">Take soccer. Hyper-capitalist competition, money, and commercialization have produced dynasties. The big five European soccer leagues—England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy—are dominated by a small number of clubs, which are far richer than the rest. In Italy, Juventus has won the league <a href="https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-soccer-italy-spa-juv-report/juventus-clinch-eighth-serie-a-title-in-a-row-idUKKCN1RW0JU">eight times in a row</a>. In Germany, Bayern the past seven. In France, Paris St. Germain has won six of the past seven.</p><p dir="ltr">But that is domestically. In the Champions League, no club has been able to dominate—Real Madrid is the only team ever to have won in successive years. In the past 15 years, the competition has been won by eight different teams.</p><p dir="ltr">And because simply participating in the Champions League is so lucrative, the giants of European soccer are now exploring ways to ensure that they cannot be easily eliminated from the competition by expanding it. “A step closer to the franchise model,” as Marcotti puts it. “The top 10 to 12 clubs, they aren’t professional clubs; they are playing a different sport. They are in the entertainment business.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/most-significant-sports-victory-all-time/596680/?utm_source=feed">Read: What is the most significant sports victory of all time?</a>]</i></p><p>As with politics and culture, Europe is adapting to an American world, copying its successes and wealth. European soccer clubs are becoming American: franchises in a global entertainment industry, fueled by wealth pouring in from around the world. That makes European soccer a rival of its American competitors in the global entertainment market, with contracts to beam its product into the U.S. market.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p dir="ltr">American soccer, meanwhile, is still unable to compete with Europe—decades after its Major League Soccer championship was created, despite the wealth and growing popularity of soccer in the United States. Those struggles offer a lesson: The U.S. is exceptional in areas where it sets the rules, but less so elsewhere, when it must play by those devised by others. (Indeed, the MLS is showing signs of trying to adapt to the rest of the world, as Europe has adapted to the U.S.: The MLS’s salary cap now has a special loophole to allow American clubs to sign global superstars at much higher salaries.)</p><p>In Theroux’s book, he lamented the poverty and desperation of Alabama and Mississippi, Arkansas and South Carolina, likening them to the locales of his travels through sub-Saharan Africa and India. “Though America in its greatness is singular,” he wrote, “it resembles the rest of the world in its failures.”</p><p dir="ltr">Equally, the U.S. is singular in the sports it has created, but not in anyone else’s. Outside sports, for much of the past 30 years, the U.S. has been playing its own game—economically, militarily, and politically. But now, even in these realms, it is no longer purely an American game.</p><p dir="ltr">In sports, as in life, the world is becoming more American—and so America is becoming less exceptional.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/jlma-jgTtKo" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Tom McTaguehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/tom-mctague/?utm_source=feedGreg Fiume / GettyThe Washington Nationals mascot Teddy Roosevelt wins the presidents' race, a home-game tradition at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.America’s Wildly Successful Socialist Experiment2019-09-14T06:00:00-04:002019-09-14T17:34:54-04:00In sports, and in life, Europe and the United States see their societies differently—just not in the ways you might expect.https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/09/us-europe-soccer-football/598012/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:374-597952<p>Here is one more dip into the waters of ancient Rome. For those joining us late:</p><ul><li>In a “thought experiment” <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/in-the-fall-of-rome-good-news-for-america/596638/?utm_source=feed">article in the new issue</a> of the print magazine, I ask: What can troubled citizens of today’s America learn from the history of Rome? But the question concerned not the much-publicized lead up to “Decline and Fall.” Rather it was about the “After the Fall” era, known to the scholars at “Late Antiquity.”</li>
<li>In <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2019/09/after-the-fall-what-rome-means-for-america/597526/?utm_source=feed">a first round of responses</a>, academic historians and others pushed back (mainly) against the headline of the article. The headline said, “The Fall of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad.” The academics replied, “Oh yes it was!”</li>
<li>Next, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2019/09/who-would-rather-be-living-in-the-13th-century-than-today/597592/?utm_source=feed">a governance expert</a> drew parallels between the “Late Antiquity” era and the tension between centralized efforts, and dispersed local innovations, that have been part of the American saga from the very start.</li>
<li>Then, other readers suggested <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2019/09/im-not-tossing-in-the-towel-yet-rome-and-america/597673/?utm_source=feed">other ways</a> of making connections, contrasts, and implications.</li>
</ul><p>That brings us to what will probably be the wrap-up—but who knows. Here are several more messages, starting with a long one, about further extracting Rome-and-America comparisons and contrasts:</p><p>1) “<em>The empire made the emperors</em>.” In my article, I said that since World War II the United States has run an “empire without the name.” A historically minded reader draws out the implications:</p><blockquote>
<p>First, it’s entirely appropriate, as you do, to compare the Roman and American <i>empires—</i>even though the US rules its empire as Romans of the <em>republican</em> (not imperial) era did. </p>
<p>In other words, the US empire is an “empire of obedience.” It uses all manner of tools to persuade semi-independent states and other groups to do its bidding, rather than directly governing territories within formal borders. Direct governance and a formalization of borders occurred under the Roman <i>princeps</i> (emperors).</p>
<p>Second, while it’s convenient to date the “fall” of the western Roman empire, it’s not especially useful from an analytic perspective. The western empire had been decentralizing for quite some time, while “barbarians” had been effectively ruling parts of it, directly and indirectly. </p>
<p>It’s critical to note these groups did not conceive of themselves as “invading” or seeking to “overthrow” Roman rule. By and large, they were forced to enter Roman territory by other attackers. Their rulers were also, by and large, Romanized. They largely ruled in cooperation with local Roman elites and using Roman techniques. Odoacer positioned himself as a local Roman ruler formally subservient to the emperor in Constantinople.</p>
<p>What happened in the West was very different from what happened in the East, when the truly “foreign” armies of Islam invaded and conquered territory ….</p>
<p>Third, it’s a bit of a stretch to say decentralization that happened in the 4th and 5th centuries was necessary for developments that came into their own 1,000 years later. There were guild-like groups in 1st century Rome. The Romans appear to have developed fairly sophisticated credit systems and engaged in long-range trade. Monasteries flourished in the eastern empire, which remained quite centralized and even more heavily militarized. And so on. </p>
<p>Could all of this had developed in something like the direction it took if the Roman state had not succumbed, over many years, to internal and external pressures? It’s impossible to say. But I also think it’s impossible to say it wouldn’t have.</p>
<hr class="c-section-divider"><p>In my mind, here’s the most relevant lesson from Rome for current US developments: The emperors didn’t make the empire. The empire made the emperors. </p>
<p>The US has had an emperor for decades, both through the taking of power and, more importantly (and in Roman fashion), through Congress delegating its powers to him. Trump’s willingness to use those powers has revealed what has been the case for some time.</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><figure><img alt="" height="495" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/06070v/783f0fc94.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">Another scene from Constantinople, seat of the Eastern Empire long after the fall of Rome (<a href="https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001699435/">Library of Congress</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>2) “<em>Last Bastion of Democracy.</em>” The message below represents many I’ve received to similar effect, about what America’s fate might mean for China’s influence.</p><blockquote>
<p>I’ll bet that the majority of people who lived under Roman rule and were not rich by their historic standards would argue that after Rome’s fall most of everything went to the crapper. Although the Romans were brutal at times, those under their rule were largely protected by Rome’s legions at the request of the local governor ….</p>
<p>Suggesting that America’s fall might not be so bad based on Rome’s fall and what occurred afterwards ignores the presence of Russia and China in the world today ………..</p>
<p>imagine a world without one of the last bastions of democracy, the one that feeds innovation and who has fed a large part of the world for decades. A world run by Putin and Xi, yea right, that would be pretty.</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><figure><img alt="" height="500" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/08420r/b654d615b.jpg" width="640"><figcaption class="caption">“Combat des Huns,” by Julius Thaeter (<a href="https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003689346/">Library of Congress</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>3) “<em>Goths were very popular</em>.” A reader who is conducting historical research, and who prefaces his note with an (unnecessary) apology for errors in English he might make as a non-native speaker, writes about why “barbarian” cultures spread so rapidly in Rome’s absence:</p><blockquote>
<p>I just read <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammianus_Marcellinus">Ammianus Marcellinus</a>’ account (among many others) of the accelerated decline of the Empire in the second half of the 4th century and how it lead to its fall a century later.</p>
<p>One fact seldom mentioned about Romanity and Greco-Roman culture is how the people that lived under it seemed to deeply hate it.</p>
<p>A reoccurring fact of the era is how local populations defected to the barbarian tribes massively. People joined the Goths, the Lombards, the Franks and even the Huns in their wars against their own country! Goths were very popular among the population, even when then besieged Rome, we hear about the Roman plebs joining forces with their attackers.<br><br>
Whole provinces that had been deeply Romanised, even colonized by Romans adopted Barbarian customs so quickly it looks like they were not conquered but liberated. Gaul, Italy, Moesia (in today’s Bulgaria) went over the Barbarians in some cases as fast as a generation. By the 6th century, Italians—<i>Italians</i>!—were proud to call themselves Lombards. …</p>
<p>There are many reasons for that; the institution of slavery, the degradation and corruption of civic institutions and services, the turbulent switch from a multireligious Empire to a monotheist and rigidly orthodox quasi-Theocracy.</p>
<p>From reading A. Marcellinus, I was surprised to learn that in fact, Roman civilisation at that point was only working were the emperor was currently residing. As soon as the emperor moved, law, order and good administration collapsed. This is probably why the Emperors in the 4th century were constantly on the move ….</p>
</blockquote><hr class="c-section-divider"><figure><img alt="" height="641" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/29139v/74421a893.jpg" width="450"><figcaption class="caption">Americans of the Grover Cleveland era trying to repair a classical-Roman-style statue named “National Prosperity,” in an 1893 print from <em>Puck</em>, by Udo Keppler. (<a href="https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012648769/">Library of Congress</a>)</figcaption></figure><p>4) <em>Wrapping it up</em>. From a reader in the Midwest:</p><p>1) My takeaway from decades-ago reading was that European technology, commerce, wealth surpassed Roman levels around 1100 or so. If that’s right, there was a dark age in concrete senses. The trend among historians I read in graduate school was to push the Renaissance back earlier and earlier, but not to deny that there were losses requiring a renaissance.</p><blockquote>
<p>Then again, who knows, maybe they were wrong, and/or current revisionism has shrunk the dark age (rightly or questionably) to nothing.</p>
<p>2. If the U.S. federal government continues its descent it will probably take malign forms that will suffocate or actively crush effective local government and other cultural capital. …</p>
<p>5. The question of whether our federal government is on a permanent downward trajectory raises the question of risk/reward in the most radical proposed norm-breaking for a narrow Democratic majority: filibuster end, new state creation [JF note: eg, Puerto Rico, D.C., court packing]. Maybe we’re at the point where risk-taking is the most prudent course—a grab to activate the emerging demographic majority before Republicans manage to suppress democracy altogether.</p>
<p>6. The Pax Romana was also real (or was it?), and the end of Pax Americana may prove very dangerous.</p>
<p>7. Environmental pressure—rising seas, desertification, natural disasters—is probably already driving and will continue driving government dysfunction, while government dysfunction accelerates environmental degradation.</p>
<hr class="c-section-divider"><p>I am not entirely despairing. It’s always hard to tell what ills are cyclical and which ones are one-way streets. No one in the 1980s would have dreamed that crime in the U.S. would go into major remission; maybe mysterious forces will dissipate extreme polarization—and we’ll build new defenses against fake news/brainwashing in free societies. Maybe major technological breakthrough (or an ice age) will save us from global warming.</p>
<p>But it’s hard to get too cheery about compensations for [the end of] a functioning federal government.</p>
</blockquote><p>Thanks once again to all who have weighed in. </p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/CUno_Qp_Xb8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>James Fallowshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-fallows/?utm_source=feedLibrary of CongressConstantinople at night, in a print from around the turn of the 20th century. The Eastern Roman Empire, based in Constantinople, endured for many centuries after the fall of the Western Empire, in Rome.Without a Functioning National Government, What’s Left?2019-09-14T06:00:00-04:002019-09-14T15:48:22-04:00Here is one more dip into the waters of ancient Rome. For those joining us late: In a…https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2019/09/without-a-functioning-national-government-whats-left/597952/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-598039<blockquote>
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</blockquote><hr><h3>Today in Politics</h3><figure><img alt="" height="473" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/AP_19129714308797/eb527e6bb.jpg" width="672"></figure><p><small><span>Cory Booker eats a tamale while visiting a home in Las Vegas in April of 2019. (John Locher / AP)</span></small></p><p><span><font face="Noe Text, Georgia, serif"><b>The Beef Over Meat</b></font></span></p><p dir="ltr"><em>“You are a vegan, and that’s obviously a personal choice …. So should more Americans, including those here in Texas, and in Iowa … follow your diet?”</em></p><p dir="ltr"><span>At the latest Democratic debate, moderator Jorge Ramos asked Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey a sprawling question—</span><span>vegetarianism and the environment, </span><span>Brazil, the Amazon, Trump and Bolsonaro, regulation—</span><span>that stood out from the expected policy back-and-forths. </span></p><p dir="ltr">Booker quickly said no, but that Ramos brought up the issue at all goes to show how eating meat may be <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/paper-straws-wont-stop-climate-change/596302/?utm_source=feed">following </a><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/paper-straws-wont-stop-climate-change/596302/?utm_source=feed">plastic straws</a> onto the front lines of the country’s various culture wars.</p><p dir="ltr">There’s been a growing awareness in recent years, especially on the left, that reducing meat consumption <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/if-everyone-ate-beans-instead-of-beef/535536/?utm_source=feed">could help with greenhouse-gas-emissions goals</a> (TL;DR: beans for all). Mix that with a long-standing right-wing trope of liberals as a bunch of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/07/coffee-financial-advice/594244/?utm_source=feed">latte-sipping</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/arugula-rocks-come-at-me-spinach/585571/?utm_source=feed">arugula-munching</a> urbanites. The knives are out.</p><p dir="ltr">Take Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who said during his 2018 reelection bid, <a href="https://www.statesman.com/news/20180918/searching-for-new-wedge-issue-cruz-says-orourke-will-ban-barbecue/">“if Texas elects a Democrat, they’re going to ban barbecue across the state of Texas.”</a> (A couple of years before that, Cruz <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaZGaJrd3x8">prepared</a> bacon by wrapping it around the nozzle of a machine gun and firing off rounds.) And as Democrats earlier this year talked about a Green New Deal plan that would attempt to overhaul the economy to ferret out greenhouse gases, Republicans went on the offensive to, as Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming put it, decry the plan because it meant saying <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUwmr0qcvPw&amp;feature=youtu.be">“goodbye to dairy, to beef, to family farms, to ranches.”</a></p><p dir="ltr">To be sure, <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/238328/snapshot-few-americans-vegetarian-vegan.aspx">only a small percentage of Democrats are actually vegan or vegetarian</a>—by one measure, the <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/238328/snapshot-few-americans-vegetarian-vegan.aspx">percentage of vegetarians in the country hasn’t moved much since 1999</a>—but with Booker’s veganism now trailing him on the presidential campaign trail, the beef over meat isn’t going away.</p><p style="text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/saahil-desai/?utm_source=feed"><cite>— Saahil Desai</cite></a></p><hr><h3>Democratic Debate 3.0</h3><figure><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/democratic-debate-where-was-education/598000/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" height="378" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/lead_720_405_41/a44805b36.jpg" width="672"></a></figure><figure itemprop="image" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject"><figcaption><p>(ROSARIOSCALIA/ SHUTTERSTOCK FREDERICK M. BROWN / STRINGER / ETHAN MILLER / CHIP SOMODEVILLA / GETTY / ARSH RAZIUDDIN / THE ATLANTIC)</p>
</figcaption></figure><p><font face="Noe Text, Georgia, serif"><b>Three Down, Nine More to Go: About Last Night</b></font></p><p dir="ltr">Candidates have a plan for that—but do they have a plan for passing that? Many candidates declined to go into the weeds, but “the level of detail in a proposal doesn’t always correspond to its seriousness. Just look at Trump.” <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/democratic-debate-democrats-explain-plans-houston/597967/?utm_source=feed">Edward-Isaac Dovere reports from behind the scenes in Houston.</a></p><p dir="ltr"><b>Hedge of the night: </b>There was at least one direct question that detailed-plans candidate Elizabeth Warren didn’t want to answer: Will she raise taxes on the middle class to fund Medicare for All? <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/elizabeth-warren-health-care-plan/597961/?utm_source=feed">Russell Berman examines the taxes-for-government-services tightrope Democrats have long had to navigate.</a></p><p><b>Where was the college talk?: </b>K–12 education is largely the domain of local governments, Adam Harris notes. Considering all the attention that candidates from Elizabeth Warren to Bernie Sanders to Amy Klobuchar have given this cycle to making college more affordable, why weren’t more of them talking last night about <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/democratic-debate-where-was-education/598000/?utm_source=feed">education issues that the executive branch can actually affect? </a></p><p dir="ltr"><b>Guns N’ Poses: </b>The waning candidate Beto O’Rourke leaned into the El Paso–focused reinvention of his campaign: “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” he declared. But a moment like that has the potential to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/beto-orourke-take-ar-15s/597958/?utm_source=feed">permanently change the primary debate on regulating guns</a>, Emma Green writes.</p><hr><h3><span><font face="Noe Text, Georgia, serif"><b>What Else We’re Following</b></font></span></h3><figure><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/republicans-dont-get-historically-black-colleges/597973/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" height="378" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/lead_720_405_42/ef4c24862.jpg" width="672"></a></figure><p dir="ltr"><small>Howard University graduates await the commencement speaker Chadwick Boseman in May 2018. (Eric Thayer / Reuters)</small></p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Why do Democrats win cities?</strong><span> There’s no obvious reason for why a movement led by Irish Catholic factory workers in the 1800s became the party of progressives in 2019, but </span><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/brief-history-how-democrats-conquered-city/597955/?utm_source=feed" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">much of it can be traced to the politicization of issues such as abortion and climate change</a><span>, Derek Thompson writes.</span></p><p dir="ltr"><strong>The case for black athletes to attend black colleges:</strong> It’s not racist to suggest that black athletes attending historically black colleges and universities might both benefit from the institutions and help them to grow, Jemele Hill argues: “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/republicans-dont-get-historically-black-colleges/597973/?utm_source=feed">You might think this message would resonate with conservatives.</a> Self-reliance rather than increased government dependency? Using capitalism and market forces to improve your community’s lot in life?”</p><hr><h3>Our Reporters Are Also Reading</h3><p><br>
‣ <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/us/missouri-catholic-church-sex-abuse.html">Missouri’s Attorney General Refers 12 Catholic Clergy for Prosecution</a> <em>(Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times)</em> (Paywall)</p><p>‣ <a href="https://thebulwark.com/and-yet-joe-persisted/">Biden Won by Demonstrating Why Democratic Voters Have Such Goodwill for Him</a> <em>(Jonathan V. Last, The Bulwark)</em></p><p dir="ltr">‣ <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2019/09/13/sordid-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein-threatens-mit-media-lab-future/EGT1NCInfvHbbNWpdwpyFL/story.html">A Sordid Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein Threatens MIT Media Lab’s Future</a> <em>(</em><em>Larry Edelman, The Boston Globe)</em> (Paywall)</p><p dir="ltr">‣ <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/09/12/760144527/145-ceos-call-on-senate-to-pass-commonsense-bipartisan-gun-laws">145 CEOs Call on Senate to Pass ‘Common-sense, Bipartisan’ Gun Laws</a> <em>(Bill Chappell, NPR)</em></p><hr><blockquote>
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</blockquote><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/-7nKttRouDY" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Saahil Desaihttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/saahil-desai/?utm_source=feedChristian Pazhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/christian-paz/?utm_source=feed<em>The Atlantic</em> Politics Daily: Eat Meat, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants2019-09-13T18:58:22-04:002019-09-13T19:28:48-04:00Is eating meat following plastic straws onto the front lines of the country’s various culture wars? Plus: The question Elizabeth Warren didn’t want to answer.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/tk-politics-daily/598039/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597979<p>A few months ago, Kelley Williams-Bolar started getting phone calls in the middle of the night, telling her she was on the news again. People were tagging her on Facebook and mentioning her on Twitter. “Honestly, I didn’t put the two together! I didn’t think other people would put the two together!” she told me this week.</p><p>The “two together” are Williams-Bolar and Felicity Huffman. Both are committed mothers of daughters. Both are working women. Both have become national-media sensations. Both are accused of committing crimes to obtain a better education for their children.</p><p>But Williams-Bolar and Huffman are not so much analogues as funhouse-mirror versions of each other, their stories of justice and injustice similar and yet distorted and converse. Huffman, who starred on <em>Desperate Housewives</em>, has admitted to paying $15,000 for a proctor to correct her daughter’s standardized-test scores. She was swept up in the “<a href="https://ktla.com/2019/09/12/felicity-huffman-set-to-be-sentenced-friday-in-college-admissions-scam/">Varsity Blues</a>” investigation into corruption, bribery, and fraud in elite-college admissions, and today she received a <a href="https://twitter.com/Tom_Winter/status/1172594906226987008">two-week sentence</a>. A decade ago, Williams-Bolar was a single, black mother living in public housing. In 2011, the state of Ohio convicted and imprisoned her for falsifying her address to get her kids into better public schools. At Huffman’s sentencing hearing, a federal prosecutor <a href="https://twitter.com/juliareinstein/status/1172585980513214466">cited</a> Williams-Bolar’s case, calling prison the “great leveler.”</p><p>One is a story of a family having everything and wanting more, exemplifying the opportunity-hoarding of America’s often-unaccountable 1 percenters. The other is a story of a family working with what they had, seeking opportunity amid the deep forces of segregation, wealth inequality, and public underinvestment.</p><p>Williams-Bolar did not mean to become a cause célèbre any more than Huffman; she did not even realize she was doing anything wrong at the time. Having divorced her abusive spouse, she was attending the University of Akron, working as a teacher’s aide, and raising her daughters, Kayla and Jada. She wanted to become a teacher, as well as a homeowner, she told me, and she wanted to raise her daughters in better circumstances than she grew up in.</p><p>That meant seeking better options than the low-performing Akron public schools her daughters were attending. At one of them, the “ceiling [was] falling in,” she said: extensive water damage, mold, old and outdated textbooks, overworked teachers, unruly classrooms. Her kids were struggling. “My girls were very mild—especially my youngest one; she was a tiny little thing,” she said. “When my girls started getting bullied, I said <em>no</em>.”</p><p>Williams-Bolar’s father, Edward Williams, who lived nearby, spent ample time taking care of the girls. Williams-Bolar split time between the two homes herself — especially after her house was burglarized. The family decided to enroll the girls in school using his address in the nearby Copley-Fairlawn school district, which met all of Ohio’s 26 educational standards, whereas the Akron schools met only four. “The bullying helped push me over the edge to say, <em>Well, my dad can take care of them. He can see that they get off and on the bus safely. He can watch them while I’m in college</em>,” Williams-Bolar told me. </p><p>She loved that in the suburbs the girls were going to classrooms with far more resources. “That school out in Copley—they had acres of land. They had greenhouses! They had an experience that inner-city kids would never understand, you see,” she told me. “It was so fabulous—science and everything else too. But the science was what took me overboard. I was like: <em>Look at this! They’ve got a greenhouse and it’s beautiful!</em>”</p><p>What the Williams-Bolar family engaged in is called “boundary hopping” or “district hopping”—or, when it gets caught in the legal system, “residency fraud” or “enrollment fraud.” There are no hard numbers on how common it is, but it is very, very common, educational experts believe, particularly where high-achieving and low-achieving school districts abut one another and where inequality is acute. One survey of public schools in Berkeley, California, for instance, suggested that 8 to 12 percent of enrolled students lived <a href="https://www.berkeleyside.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Attending-to-the-Bottomline-Final.pdf">out-of-bounds</a>.</p><p>What is uncommon is for parents to be charged with a felony for engaging in the practice, rather than having their children unenrolled or being fined or, perhaps most likely, the school district looking the other way. After her kids started in the Copley-Fairlawn schools, Williams-Bolar noticed someone following her and worried she was being stalked. She started carrying mace. That “stalker” was a private investigator hired by the school district to prove that Williams-Bolar’s girls were out-of-bounds.</p><p>Things spiraled from there: Williams-Bolar and her father were charged with felonies related to the falsification of records and theft of public education. They fought the charges, believing that they had done nothing wrong. The jury in Edward Williams’s trial failed to reach a verdict; Williams-Bolar was convicted of some charges and handed two concurrent five-year sentences, suspended down to 10 days. The judge presiding over her case <a href="https://www.pressreader.com/">argued that</a> “others who think they might defraud the school system perhaps will think twice.”</p><p>If we have little hard data on boundary-hopping, we have even less on punishments for boundary-hopping. But some <a href="https://www.academia.edu/32429211/Poor_Choices">researchers</a> argue that school districts have become more aggressive in identifying <a href="https://whyy.org/segments/the-money-shot-how-school-districts-find-and-prove-residency-fraud/">out-of-bounds students</a>, purging them, and legally threatening their parents. And it looks like the students who get bounced are <a href="https://whyy.org/segments/suburban-schools-residency-enforcement-disproportionately-affects-kids-of-color/">disproportionately</a> low-income and nonwhite, as are the parents who end up <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2014/1/21/where-school-boundaryhoppingcanmeantimeinjail.html">enmeshed in the justice system</a>.</p><p>Around the same time that Williams-Bolar went to trial, Tonya McDowell, a homeless single mother in Connecticut, <a href="https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/Cops-Bust-Homless-Woman-for-Sending-Child-to-School-120004374.html">was convicted</a> on similar charges. She ended up in jail; the friend who let her use her address for enrollment purposes wound up <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2011/10/20_years_in_prison_for_sending_your_kids_to_the_wrong_school_inequality_in_school_systems_leads_parents_to_big_risks/">homeless</a> and briefly lost custody of her own children.</p><p>Williams-Bolar and McDowell made their choices in an educational system rife with inequalities, among them deeply unequal <a href="http://www.schoolfundingfairness.org/">per-pupil financing</a> and persistent <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/segregation-now/359813/?utm_source=feed">school segregation</a>. School districts have a way of turning a public good into a private good. Rich families enroll their kids in neighborhood schools, hoarding opportunity through boundary enforcement, zoning laws, real-estate prices, and <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-modern-day-redlining-20180215-story.html">redlining</a>. The structure of education financing gives parents a sense of entitlement and ownership: They <em>pay </em>for schools with their mortgages and property taxes, and therefore the school is <em>theirs</em>. (Of course, the math is <a href="https://apps.urban.org/features/funding-formulas/">more complicated</a> than that.) In-boundary parents are often the initiators of boundary-hopping investigations; they believe that out-of-boundary parents are stealing. </p><p>Boundary-hopping does stress school districts, crowding classrooms and frustrating administrators. It also diverts much-needed funding from lower-performing schools, in some cases. But a good public education is meant to belong to everyone. And as a single mother in school herself, Williams-Bolar could not have made rent, let alone purchased a home, in a tony suburban school district.</p><p>Rich families have the option of pulling their kids out of public schools and putting them in private or parochial ones, as well as the option of moving to a better district. Rich families have the option of coaching their kids through standardized tests, and helping ensure they get into <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/gifted-and-talented-programs-separate-students-race/587614/?utm_source=feed">gifted and talented</a> programs and specialized schools. Rich families have the resources to investigate what different public schools offer, and to game lottery and ranked-choice <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-segregation.html">enrollment systems</a>. Later on in their kids’ lives, rich families have the ability to provide tax-deductible gifts to colleges to get mediocre <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/college-bribe-scandal-about-class-inequality/584797/?utm_source=feed">students accepted</a>. Rich families sometimes skirt the law, too — cheating on <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/03/lori-loughlin-felicity-huffman-college-cheating-scandal">standardized tests</a>, making up their kids’ athletic accomplishments, paying bribes.</p><p>Poor families have far fewer options—boundary-hopping, for many, is one of the few ways to get into a better school district. Moreover, given that low-income families often have unstable housing situations and use intergenerational child-care structures, what might seem like enrollment fraud to a school district might feel like nothing more than school choice to a parent. Signing her kids up for school with her dad just made sense, Williams-Bolar stressed.</p><p>For that decision, she ended up in jail, even though she had never been arrested, let alone convicted of a crime, she said. She sobbed for hours when she arrived in her holding cell. She lost 15 pounds, unable to bring herself to eat. “When I was walking into general population, I walked through the door and smelled a smell—not like a dead rat, or mold, or this or that,” she said. “No, it had its own distinctive smell. And it smelled like sin. I said that to the sheriff, and she told me: ‘You’re not the first person who has told me that.’”</p><p>She was never the same after that trauma, she told me. She spent years and years struggling with depression, shame, and regret. Her father ended up dying in prison on unrelated <a href="https://www.ohio.com/article/20120512/NEWS/305129557">charges</a>. Her girls ended up back in the struggling Akron schools. A few months after she was released, then-Governor John Kasich provided her with <a href="https://www.dispatch.com/article/20110907/NEWS/309079828">partial clemency</a>, reducing her felonies to misdemeanors.</p><p>Never the same, she still pushes forward. Williams-Bolar has become an advocate for social justice, criminal-justice reform, and public education. She speaks at churches, colleges, and high schools. She lobbies for states to lower penalties for parents engaging in boundary-hopping. And she works in the Akron public schools as a teacher’s assistant, helping kids with behavioral challenges.</p><p>“These kids have gone through so much,” she told me. “They’ve been in foster care. They’ve been abused at home. They have a parent in prison. I can talk to them and I can tell them my background, and that resonates with some of these kids to the point where they will build a bond with me. You don’t understand what that does for me—to see that I can break through to a kid who’s reserved, and has all these issues going on.”</p><p>Both Felicity Huffman and Kelley Williams-Bolar, from their very different vantage points, tried to take advantage of a system they knew to be unfair. In both cases, the real scandal is what is legal, and the real victims the kids deprived of opportunity by dint of their <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/raj-chettys-american-dream/592804/?utm_source=feed">family’s bank account and address</a>.</p><p></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/oh91rLFiVTg" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Annie Lowreyhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/annie-lowrey/?utm_source=feedNick Starichenko / ShutterstockHer Only Crime Was Helping Her Kids2019-09-13T15:45:00-04:002019-09-13T16:48:29-04:00Kelley Williams-Bolar, like Felicity Huffman, was punished for trying to get her children a better education.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/her-only-crime-was-helping-her-kid/597979/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-598033<p>“I’m happy to apologize to anyone who’s actually offended by anything I’ve said.” That was new <em>Saturday Night Live </em>cast member Shane Gillis’s attempt at a mea culpa,<em> </em>posted to Twitter at 10:45 p.m. last night, for the <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/snl-shane-gillis-racist-homophobic-remarks.html">trove of racist and homophobic remarks</a> that was being newly circulated and dissected online hours after his hiring was announced. Even by the standards of the self-serving “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/01/kevin-hart-ellen-oscars-and-phantom-apology/579475/?utm_source=feed">phantom apology</a>” many public figures rely on these days, the statement was flimsy. It’s hard to watch the clips in question—including one in which Gillis uses the phrase “fucking Chinks”—and to then accept the comedian’s explanation that he was merely pushing the boundaries and taking the risks required to create great comedy.</p><p>In case it wasn’t clear, nothing in the extended digressions about Chinatown or what counts as (in Gillis’s words) “nice racism” qualifies as great comedy; it doesn’t even rise to the level of intelligible conversation. When <em>SNL </em>announced its three <a href="https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/saturday-night-live-season-45-cast-1203333599/">new hires</a> yesterday, much of the initial excitement focused on the casting of Bowen Yang, the first Chinese American actor in the show’s 45-year history. (The comedian Chloe Fineman also joined Yang and Gillis.) But any elation quickly dissolved as clips of Gillis began spreading on social media, including footage of him aggressively mocking Chinese accents, casually dropping racial slurs, and generally ruminating on all kinds of tired and vile stereotypes with his podcast co-host, Matt McCusker. </p><p>It is not unusual for reporters and comedy fans to trawl through the comedic history of a newly announced <em>SNL </em>player. When Jon Rudnitsky was <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/saturday-night-live-jon-rudnitsky/403282/?utm_source=feed">brought aboard</a> in 2015, he was castigated for several <a href="https://news.avclub.com/snl-new-addition-jon-rudnitsky-has-some-skeletons-in-hi-1798283743">ugly tweets</a> in his past; while he weathered that storm, he only lasted a year on the show and largely as a background extra. Melissa Villaseñor was similarly criticized for <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/marcusjones/melissa-villasenor-racist-tweets">offensive jokes</a> in her Twitter history, many of which she deleted; she later called the posts a failed attempt to be <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/09/29/652610008/a-top-impressionist-melissa-villase-or-is-finding-her-own-voice-on-snl">edgy</a>. In both cases, the <em>SNL </em>producer and creator, Lorne Michaels, silently waited out the online blowback. But Gillis’s case will be harder to ignore.</p><p>Megh Wright of <em>Vulture </em>has already <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/snl-shane-gillis-racist-homophobic-remarks.html">extensively reported</a> on Gillis’s history of lazily offensive comedy, most of it from podcast episodes as recent as 2018. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MSsEcReTPoDcAsT/">A subreddit</a> devoted to his podcast (which has already been locked from public viewing) is reportedly “filled with homophobic slurs,” while one <a href="https://twitter.com/goodgoodcomedy/status/1172309623690289157">Philadelphia comedy-theater</a> owner told Wright she had banned Gillis “because of racist, homophobic, and sexist things he’s said on and offstage.” After years in the Philadelphia scene, Gillis moved to New York and was this year named one of the “new faces” at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival, a crucial showcase for up-and-coming comedy talent.</p><p>Gillis’s stand-up routines are, of course, far more polished than the podcast excerpts. One <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0pfZygi2t8&amp;t=10s">Comedy Central clip</a> is about how white people like country music because “you can understand all the lyrics”; Gillis later mocks the assumption that he’d be a Trump voter (while saying he didn’t actually vote for Donald Trump). Watching Gillis onstage, it’s clear what might have appealed to Michaels and to <em>SNL </em>head writers Colin Jost and Michael Che; the latter, especially, is<a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/michael-che-progressives-new-york_n_5bdfab5ce4b04367a87dda64"> fond of prodding</a> “liberal kids [in] coastal cities” and might have been drawn to Gillis’s more “red state” mentality.</p><p>Gillis’s defense that he’s simply taking “risks” in the name of a good laugh is euphemistic and disingenuous at best. There are plenty of provocative comedians who do not have a bad-enough reputation to get banned from stand-up clubs, or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsKsjL4pjKI">episodes of podcasts</a> dedicated to ranking which races are best at comedy. Aside from the racist remarks, what stands out most from this particular <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsKsjL4pjKI">episode</a> of <em>Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast </em>is a sense of resentment as the two hosts discuss their hatred of successful comics like <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/the-bracing-authenticity-of-chris-gethards-career-suicide/525768/?utm_source=feed">Chris Gethard</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/12/netflixs-patriot-act-hasan-minhaj-makes-talk-show/577048/?utm_source=feed">Hasan Minhaj</a>, and criticize a <em>Rolling Stone</em> list of comics to watch that doesn’t include any straight white men.</p><p>Backbiting in the comedy scene isn’t a rare phenomenon, but Gillis’s grousing underlines just how little respect he has for any diversity of voices in a medium whose purported values he’s invoking to defend himself. His tweeted statement suggests anything terrible he might have said was all to help develop his craft, and yet his conception of that craft is frustratingly narrow. Decades after its debut, <em>Saturday Night Live </em>remains a career pinnacle that so many comedy professionals aspire to; the question now is whether Michaels and NBC will reflect on what it would mean for working and aspiring comics if the show included Gillis in the cast.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/qBFq53ccCtI" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>David Simshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-sims/?utm_source=feedJeff Kravitz / FilmMagic / Getty<em>Saturday Night Live </em>Made a Mistake Hiring Shane Gillis2019-09-13T14:03:44-04:002019-09-13T14:57:32-04:00The news that the show had hired its first Chinese American cast member was quickly overshadowed by reports that another new hire had a history of racist remarks.https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/09/saturday-night-live-cant-ignore-its-shane-gillis-problem/598033/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:39-596626<h3>The Stock-Buyback Swindle</h3><p class="letter-intro"><em>American corporations are spending trillions of dollars to repurchase their own stock, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-stock-buyback-swindle/592774/?utm_source=feed">Jerry Useem reported in August</a>. The practice is enriching CEOs—at the expense of everyone else.</em></p><hr><p>I was an institutional investor in the 1980s and ’90s. Share repurchases were a fraud then and they are a fraud now. When companies take cash away from good investment opportunities, it is a sin. When they use debt to finance share repurchases, it is even worse.</p><p class="letter">American companies would have a bright future if they put money into innovation and research and development, invested in their workforce instead of pushing real wages down, and took responsibility for how their business affects the community. It’s unfortunate that many companies would not spend a dime to ameliorate the negative impacts they have on their community—polluting the environment, failing to create jobs while demanding tax breaks, and putting strains on infrastructure.</p><p class="letter">Future economic historians will look back on this period as one when greed combined with really bad financial engineering led to a decline in America’s economic strength.</p><p class="letter-info"><b class="letter-writer">Nancy Langwiser-Kear </b><br><em class="letter-writer-info">Wellesley, Mass.</em></p><hr><p class="letter">The way I was taught long ago is that when there are no better uses for a company’s excess capital <i>and</i> the price of the company’s stock is “undervalued,” it’s okay to repurchase company shares, especially by a company in the mature stage of its product life cycle. Given the rise in stock prices, it’s disturbing to see so much stock-buyback activity.</p><p class="letter">Are opportunities for reinvesting earnings in the future development of a company dwindling?</p><p class="letter-info"><b class="letter-writer">Rex O’Steen III </b><br><em class="letter-writer-info">Greenville, S.C.</em></p><hr><p class="letter">I worked for Equifax for five years and left before the data breach. One year, the company “invested” more than $500 million, which was roughly one-fifth of its annual revenue, in buybacks. When asked after leaving about the data breach, I always said that one-tenth of the amount invested in buybacks—about $50 million—would have gone a long way to secure consumer data.</p><p class="letter-info"><b class="letter-writer">Jean Nickerson</b><br><em class="letter-writer-info">Brampton, Ontario</em></p><hr><p class="letter">I got my M.B.A. in 1972, and “shareholder value” was the mantra back then. In no way was it an invention of the 1980s. It’s tempting to blame the emphasis on shareholder value on Ronald Reagan or modern corporate profit-driven culture, but that’s a canard. The phenomenon is really all about the stock market and short-term results. There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with share buybacks, although they do illustrate that corporations don’t have enough internal investment opportunities and certainly didn’t need a huge tax reduction like the one passed in 2017, given that they cannot figure out how to profitably invest the money already in their coffers. But that’s a different story of greed from the one being told.</p><p class="letter-info"><b class="letter-writer">Christian Y. Wyser-Pratte</b><br><em class="letter-writer-info">Ossining, N.Y.</em></p><hr><p class="letter">I find no fault with the buyback option. The stated purpose of buybacks is to raise share value, for all shareholders. I care not if executives profit along with every other shareholder. (I care a lot if they profit and the company’s share value lags or declines, as was the case with Yahoo.) A reduced share count translates into retained earnings. That can find a home in R&amp;D or facilities planning.</p><p class="letter">Jerry Useem states that Home Depot employees could have earned an additional $18,000 a year had buybacks been directed to that end. This raises a question: Are those employees worth that additional income? Rising stock prices lift all boats. Individuals need to get theirs in the water.</p><p class="letter-info"><b class="letter-writer">Dick Healy</b><br><em class="letter-writer-info">Chicago, Ill.</em></p><hr><p class="letter">A share repurchase is a simple distribution of profits to a business’s owners, in the form of an equity purchase. Partners in partnerships are bought out all the time. Is this a scandal? No, it’s just how businesses pay people who invest in them.</p><p class="letter">To improve management incentives, stop giving away the equity and make managers buy it on the open market, like the rest of us. Then require that they hold it as long as they work for the business. This way they’ll have real skin in the game, which means they’ll share as much downside risk as upside potential.</p><p class="letter-info"><b class="letter-writer">Daniel Ferris</b><br><em class="letter-writer-info">Vancouver, Wash.</em></p><hr><h3>Jerry Useem replies:</h3><p class="letter-response"><em>Adopting Daniel Ferris’s last recommendation—require that executives hold their shares “as long as they work for the business”—would go a long way toward addressing the iniquities of stock buybacks. Because Christian Y. Wyser-Pratte is right: There isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with buybacks per se.</em></p><p class="letter-response"><em>The problem is in their usage, which rewards inside share-sellers at the expense of outside shareholders and propagates the lack of long-term investment that Nancy Langwiser-Kear rightly warns of. Ban buybacks (a move I’m not proposing), and managers would likely revert to their former habit of using excess cash to acquire unrelated businesses. But at a minimum, regular investors should have an easier way of knowing who is profiting and when. That way they can make an informed decision about whether executives are investing for the long haul—and whether they should too.</em></p><hr><h3>DIY Coffins</h3><p class="letter-intro"><em><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/diy-coffins/592777/?utm_source=feed">In August, Rene Chun wrote</a> about New Zealand’s newly popular “coffin clubs.”</em></p><hr><p class="letter">This article reminded me of my friend Dudley, who made his own coffin in the ’90s. Dudley was a skilled carpenter and carver, so the coffin was really a work of art. My favorite embellishment: along the bottom rail of the coffin were carved the words <span class="smallcaps">handmade by occupant</span>.</p><p class="letter-info"><b class="letter-writer">L. W. Bower</b><br><em class="letter-writer-info">Albuquerque, N.M.</em></p><hr><figure><img alt="A baby's face incorporated into the American flag" height="972" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/08/FRM_Convo_BeinartMeaslesSpot/ae822f0ea.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">EDMON DE HARO</figcaption></figure><h3>Measles as Metaphor</h3><p><em><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/measles-as-metaphor/592756/?utm_source=feed">In August, Peter Beinart showed</a> what the disease’s return says about America’s ailing culture.</em></p><hr><p class="letter">I retired recently after 29 years of training and practice in primary-care pediatrics. I take exception to the notion that pediatricians do not spend time reassuring patients about vaccine safety because reimbursement is inadequate. My colleagues and I routinely stayed past the allotted 15 minutes per patient to explain to parents why their beautiful baby would be vulnerable to meningitis, pneumonia, whooping cough, and severe diarrhea if not immunized. Parents who simply have questions usually are reassured by thoughtful conversation. However, my experience is consistent with research that has shown that no amount of counseling and accurate information sways parents who are dead-set against immunizations. These encounters are deeply distressing for pediatricians, because prevention is at the heart of our mission, and we value the trust of parents more than any compensation.</p><p class="letter">True empowerment of physicians would include reinforcement by government, schools, and child-care facilities through exclusion policies of children unvaccinated for diseases that are contagious (in the absence of a medical contraindication). Insurance companies could increase premiums for families that willingly choose not to vaccinate, to reflect a higher-risk category. If greater society does not value the public-health role of vaccines, parents suspect that doctors push them for profit.</p><p class="letter-info"><b class="letter-writer">Elise Thomas, M.D.</b><br><em class="letter-writer-info">York, Pa.</em></p><hr><h3>Corrections</h3><p class="letter">“The Stock-Buyback Swindle” (August) stated that Craig Menear, the chairman and CEO of Home Depot, sold 113,687 shares of his company’s stock the same day as a conference call with investors. He sold the shares the next day.</p><p class="letter">Due to an editing error, “What Happened to Aung San Suu Kyi?” (September) indicated that Wai Wai Nu is a man. In fact, Wai Wai Nu is a woman. We regret the error.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/3Sed_49halA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Conversation2019-09-13T13:00:00-04:002019-09-13T13:00:21-04:00Readers respond to August 2019 articles on stock buybacks, the return of measles, and DIY coffins.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/the-conversation/596626/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597997<p dir="ltr">Peanuts are a uniquely dangerous legume. A small fragment of one can kill an allergic person. Even if that person is resuscitated, it’s possible to have permanent <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/41028377/amy-may-sheads-family-warn-allergies-can-cause-life-changing-damage">brain damage</a>. These severe allergic reactions are relatively rare but difficult to predict. One time, you accidentally eat a bit of peanut and get a little itchy; the next time, your airways close up and someone has to jam a needle full of adrenaline into your leg just so you can take a breath.</p><p dir="ltr">About four peanut-allergic children die every year in the United States from a reaction to peanut. Those odds are little reassurance for the millions of kids and parents who live in fear of the worst possible case. As a result, peanuts are no longer welcome in many school cafeterias. Some advocates have proposed outright <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5638467/">banning</a> peanuts in public places. Bringing peanuts to a child’s birthday party in Brooklyn ensures that you are never invited to anything again.</p><p dir="ltr">Kids’ lack of exposure to peanuts, however, seems to have an unintended consequence: more peanut allergies. In the United States, the latest estimates find that 2 to 5 percent of American kids have a peanut allergy. The number of visits to emergency rooms due to anaphylactic reactions to peanuts more than <a href="https://www.ajmc.com/journals/supplement/2018/managed-care-perspective-peanut-allergy/the-economic-impact-of-peanut-allergies">doubled</a> from 2008 to 2012. If your immune system does not learn to tolerate peanuts, it’s more likely to react violently when it first sees them. Recent guidelines have recommended that parents feed kids peanuts at a young age.</p><p dir="ltr">For kids who’ve already developed a peanut allergy, though, a similar but more controversial treatment is up for approval by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency is holding a hearing <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/06/24/2019-13354/allergenic-products-advisory-committee-notice-of-meeting">today</a> with the pharmaceutical company and its advocates, expected to inform a final ruling in coming months.</p><p dir="ltr">There is currently no “treatment” for a peanut allergy. As it is, patients are told to avoid peanuts. They are prescribed a syringe full of epinephrine (trade name: EpiPen) and taught to inject themselves if needed. Despite much advancement in medical science and technology over the decades, nothing has given families peace of mind that the allergy itself could be treated, or at least tempered. Until now. The new approach involves trying to reprogram the immune system by giving a person … peanuts.</p><p dir="ltr">This might sound dangerous, because it is.</p><p dir="ltr">Known as oral immunotherapy, the idea is that by exposing a person to tiny amounts of peanut, that person will slowly become able to tolerate it. Immunotherapy is common practice in the form of allergy shots for things such as pollen: You inject bits of the protein and watch as the immune system gets more tolerant and the person becomes less wheezy.</p><p dir="ltr">But oral immunotherapy with peanuts is considered experimental, and no professional organization recommends that parents give any peanuts to an allergic person. Even though some practitioners have concocted homespun protocols, most doctors feel unsafe overseeing any such attempts. Given the potential for a fatal reaction, some believe that no one should yet be trying out the approach outside of a research setting.</p><p dir="ltr">In the late 1990s, there was an attempt to treat peanut allergies with a similar shot—an injection of liquid peanut extract. A patient died of anaphylaxis during a clinical trial (reportedly due to a labeling error). The incident shut down the trial and cast a chill over the field for a while. Then, in the 2000s, a group of scientists at Duke University rekindled the idea and chose the oral route. They published <a href="https://www.med.unc.edu/microimm/directory/wesley-burks-phd/">proof-of-concept</a> studies in which allergic mice were safely given microscopic amounts of crushed peanut and their allergies waned.</p><p>Excited by the prospect of extending this to humans, the influencers of the food-allergy world convened in Boston in 2011 to try to move the concept forward. Food Allergy Research &amp; Education, or FARE, a nonprofit advocacy and lobbying group that’s partly funded by the pharmaceutical industry, held a retreat that included patient advocates, the researchers from Duke and elsewhere, regulators, and industries. The group agreed that in order to study oral immunotherapy safely, scientists needed a standardized product that would allow everyone to know exactly how much peanut was being given.</p><p dir="ltr">“The problem was that this wasn’t exactly a product that a typical drug company would make,” says Brian Vickery, an allergist involved in the proof-of-concept studies. Nor was the product a food, exactly. “And there was nothing to be licensed—it was peanut flour, you know?”</p><p dir="ltr">After attempting to shop the idea around to various pharmaceutical companies, FARE itself helped found a company that would become known as Aimmune. Though Aimmune was technically a pharmaceutical company, its work focused on making food-based therapies. These are regulated by the FDA as drugs, but under the new and growing category of “biologics”—drugs that come from living organisms, such as vaccines made from bacterial proteins or insulin made from the human hormone. In Aimmune’s case, the biologic would be peanut flour placed in a capsule. The company went public in <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1631650/000119312515245362/d932346ds1.htm">2015</a> after raising $160 million in venture-capital funding.</p><p dir="ltr">In 2016, Vickery left Duke to work full time for Aimmune, where he oversaw a <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa1812856">clinical trial</a> of the peanut flour. Two groups of about 250 people with peanut allergies took the peanut pill or placebo every day and were monitored over the course of a year. At the end of the experiment, the participants all ate small, gradually increasing doses of peanut, up to about two peanuts. The researchers measured how much it took to cause a reaction. Almost everyone in the placebo group had a reaction before reaching the full amount. But among the people taking the peanut-flour pill, two-thirds could safely eat two peanuts.</p><p dir="ltr">Vickery, who now directs the food-allergy program at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, went on to publish the findings in <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa1812856"><em>The New England Journal of Medicine</em></a> last November. The study’s other authors remain on Aimmune’s staff. It is not uncommon for researchers to be funded by pharmaceutical companies; it is less common for researchers to be fully employed by the company making the product in question.</p><p dir="ltr">Based on this single, year-long trial, Aimmune is now petitioning the FDA to approve its powder as a drug. Instead of “peanut flour,” Aimmune calls the drug Palforzia. It does not promise to give people an ability to eat peanuts—only to potentially protect a person in the case of a small, accidental ingestion. Analysts have put the cost at <a href="https://icer-review.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/ICER_PeanutAllergy_RAAG_071019.pdf">$4,200</a> a year. The drug would have to be taken indefinitely.</p><p dir="ltr">In a presentation to investors dated September 2019, Aimmune estimated that Palforzia sales would top <a href="http://ir.aimmune.com/static-files/16a9e7aa-6b56-4741-a412-8740be973887">$1 billion</a>. The document describes tentative pricing between $3,000 and $20,000 a year, and assures investors that insurance companies have already agreed to cover the drug. Sales, it says, will be driven by “compliant caregivers” and “parents and families living in fear of potential life-threatening reactions.” The presentation, which was available on Aimmune’s <a href="http://ir.aimmune.com/corporate-profile">website</a>, appears to have been removed this morning. (Aimmune did not respond to requests for comment.)</p><p dir="ltr">Thomas Casale, a professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of South Florida, serves as FARE’s chief medical adviser. Casale was a co-author with Vickery on the study of the company’s product. I asked him why other companies couldn’t simply sell peanut powder as a dietary supplement at a cost of a few dollars. In a small 2018 <a href="https://www.aaaai.org/global/latest-research-summaries/New-Research-from-JACI-In-Practice/oit">study</a>, researchers reported safely giving 1/125,000th of a peanut to allergic kids and very slowly working all the way up to 12 whole peanuts.</p><p dir="ltr">“Well, I suppose they could,” Casale said. But he went on to explain that the real value is billing codes. When peanut flour is an FDA-approved drug, that means doctors can be reimbursed for prescribing it and overseeing its administration. The process can be covered by insurance. As it is, practitioners who offer their own versions of oral immunotherapy have to be paid out of pocket. This makes it inaccessible to many patients. So, essentially, in order to make the therapy accessible, it has to become part of the system. The system is what allows pharmaceutical companies and doctors to charge insurers thousands of dollars for peanuts.</p><p>“There’s tremendous demand, because patients feel helpless and terrified,” says Jeff Tice, a physician and health-policy analyst at the University of California at San Francisco. “The insurance companies are getting ready for a large financial impact because this will get taken up quickly.”</p><p>The likelihood of rapid, widespread uptake makes concerns about safety especially salient. Tice led a team that did an extensive <a href="https://icer-review.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/ICER_PeanutAllergy_Final_Report_071019.pdf">report</a> on the product for the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, and concluded that the product stood to be widely adopted without clear benefit, and despite evident risk. Tice does not think it’s ready for approval—because it has not been found to decrease a person’s risk of a severe allergic reaction.</p><p>What wasn’t emphasized in the study in <em>The New England Journal of Medicine</em> was that when people started taking the drug, their rate of severe allergic reactions went up by six times. In the lab, the subjects taking the peanut pill were able to eat up to two peanuts. Out in the real world, those people reported many more systemic reactions: 14 percent versus just 3 percent in the control group. “This is just what we’re trying to prevent—having to get taken to the ER and getting injected in school, that sort of outcome,” Tice says. “The trials clearly demonstrated desensitization [to peanuts], but apparently at the cost of more harm, and no clear evidence of long-term benefit.”</p><p dir="ltr">In April, a meta-analysis in <em><a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)30420-9/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email">The Lancet</a></em> confirmed the same: There was “high-certainty evidence” that peanut oral immunotherapy considerably increases allergic and anaphylactic reactions, compared with avoidance or placebo treatment. The FDA committee <a href="https://www.fda.gov/advisory-committees/blood-vaccines-and-other-biologics/allergenic-products-advisory-committee-september-13-2019-meeting-announcement-09132019-09132019">lists</a> the intended use of the drug as “to reduce the risk of anaphylaxis after accidental exposure to peanut in patients.” Yet in people who’ve taken the drug, this risk has been shown to go up, not down.</p><p dir="ltr">“It’s impossible to know if the increase in anaphylaxis was due to increased exposure to peanuts because people felt protected, or if it was due to the drug itself,” Tice notes. This sort of semi-protective treatment can have the complicating effect of making a person feel more protected than they are in the real world. Letting one’s guard down, even a little, can cause any benefit of desensitization to be quickly outweighed.</p><p dir="ltr">In other words, based on what is currently known, the billion-dollar peanut powder is likely to have a net effect of increasing severe allergic reactions to peanuts. The fact that this drug is so close to becoming a household name—despite so little evidence—reflects a broader shift in how drugs are approved. The old standard was that a drug could not be taken to market until it had proved to be safe and effective in two trials with meaningful end points—ideally treating or curing a disease, or at least alleviating symptoms. Over the past decade, the FDA has loosened standards, requiring only some evidence of an effect that may or may not be meaningful.</p><p dir="ltr">Desensitizing a person to small amounts of peanut doesn’t mean Palforzia extends people’s lives. It doesn’t mean the drug keeps them out of the hospital or prevents serious allergic attacks. (The FDA does not comment on ongoing hearings and approval processes. The panel is expected to address these concerns today.)</p><p dir="ltr">Vickery, who is no longer in the full-time employ of Aimmune, admits that “for an expensive therapy, we don’t know if [Palforzia] even does what it’s supposed to do.” But he sees the implications of this approval as far bigger than peanut powder. “If a start-up can do a trial of 1,000 patients and actually get something to market as the first approved drug for peanut allergy,” he says, investors would flock to the area. Traditionally, it takes many years, multiple trials, and many millions of dollars in research and development to bring a drug to market. “If the first product were to not be approved, that would set the field back immensely,” Vickery says, optimistic that this will actually draw meaningful investment.</p><p dir="ltr">Of course, it would set the field back even more if people are harmed by a hastily approved and urgently adopted drug. Everyone I spoke with stressed the need for peanut-allergy treatment, and the demand. Patient advocates are not patient advocates if they push for approval of a drug that does more harm than good.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/8-KMjh9jEQg" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>James Hamblinhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/james-hamblin/?utm_source=feedMike Blake / ReutersThe U.S. Health-Care System Found a Way to Make Peanuts Cost $4,2002019-09-13T12:12:00-04:002019-09-13T15:01:26-04:00A new, billion-dollar pharmaceutical to treat peanut allergies is up for approval. It’s simply peanut flour.https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/dangers-peanut-allergy-drug/597997/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597946<p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">I<span class="smallcaps">n the summer of 2008,</span> a teenager woke up to find a man in her Lynnwood, Washington, apartment, standing over her with a knife. He tied her up, raped her, and took photos of her before leaving. She reported the rape, spoke with detectives, underwent a clinical sexual-assault examination, and cried as she warned her fellow participants in Project Ladder—a program helping young adults transition from foster care that had provided her housing—to lock their doors at night.</p><p dir="ltr">And then, a few days later, she recanted her report and said that she had made up the incident.</p><p dir="ltr">Referred to only by her middle name, Marie became the subject of the investigative journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize–winning report for ProPublica and the Marshall Project, called “<a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an-unbelievable-story">An Unbelievable Story of Rape</a>.” In their piece, Miller and Armstrong connected Marie’s case with that of a pair of Colorado detectives who pursued a serial rapist in 2011, and since then, the tale has been retold twice: as <a href="https://www.thisamericanlife.org/581/anatomy-of-doubt">an episode of the podcast <em>This American Life</em></a>, and as a book, originally titled <em>A False Report </em>(recently republished as <em>Unbelievable</em>), in which Miller and Armstrong expanded on the story.</p><p dir="ltr">Now Netflix has released a TV adaptation, called <em>Unbelievable</em>—and, as in the initial article, Marie serves as the limited series’ anchor into a larger exploration of rape culture. But Marie’s case could have easily been mistranslated in the dramatization process: As critics have noted over the years, television has typically trafficked in using rape as a plot device—the crime provides provocative “<a href="https://variety.com/2016/tv/features/rape-tv-television-sweet-vicious-jessica-jones-game-of-thrones-1201934910/">shorthand</a>” for drama and offers a <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/keira-knightley-on-rape-backstory-in-movies-tv-shows">shallow backstory</a> for underwritten characters. Rape scenes are <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2018/06/legion-handmaids-tale-rape-scenes-1201978988/">often seen through male characters’ eyes</a>, as in <em><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/game-of-thrones-sexual-violence/396191/?utm_source=feed">Game of Thrones</a></em>, or are overshadowed by the series’ interest in examining the possible redemption of the rapist instead, as in <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/netflixs-13-reasons-why-season-3-finale-redeems-a-rapist-but-seriously-why">the latest season of Netflix’s <em>13 Reasons Why</em></a>.</p><p dir="ltr">Rarely have dramas <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/graphic-novel-on-television-emily-nussbaum">interrogated the aftereffects of sexual trauma</a>; even more rarely have they tackled the topic <a href="https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/rape-culture-in-veronica-mars">without eventually sidelining it</a>. But <em>Unbelievable</em> concentrates its spotlight entirely on the subject, and its eight episodes can be tough to watch: Marie, played by Kaitlyn Dever (<em>Booksmart</em>), is inscrutable, even maddening, as she struggles to keep the details of her rape straight. The episodes, which toggle between two timelines and multiple cases, are loaded with exposition, law-enforcement terminology, and uncomfortable flashbacks. The most pulse-pounding sequence in the early episodes isn’t the one in which a detective draws her gun to corner a suspect; it’s the one in which she and another Colorado detective call every police department in the state after hours, trying to track down similar cases while at an empty office, at dinner with their families, or out walking the dog, off the clock but desperate to find their next lead.</p><p dir="ltr">“I haven’t read a lot of scripts that talk about [rape] the way we do,” Dever told me, shaking her head, when we spoke in late August. “Not often.”</p><p>Even Miller and Armstrong, long before <em>Unbelievable</em> was made, saw the difficulty in potentially adapting a story of rape for the screen, attributing the challenge to the delicate nature of such cases. “Many detectives avoided sex crimes if they could,” they wrote in <em>A False Report</em>. “They weren’t as high profile as homicides; nobody came looking to do a movie about a rape case. Where homicides were black and white, rape was filled with grays. And rape victims were alive and hurting. Their pain was always in your face—and you could never, ever look away.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="448" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/UNBELIEVABLE_102_Unit_00091R/5324df4da.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">“On so many levels, it was just a really compelling story about the human condition,” the director Lisa Cholodenko (<em>right</em>, opposite the showrunner Susannah Grant) said of the series. (Beth Dubber / Netflix)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">For the writer and showrunner Susannah Grant (<em>Erin Brockovich</em>), though, that’s exactly why <em>Unbelievable</em> had to be made: The series could take certain truths about rape cases—that there is no “perfect” victim, no “perfect” case, no “perfect” investigation—and present them so that viewers couldn’t look away. “There was one thing I thought was really important to show,” she told me. “[And that] was, people don’t just have one reaction to a trauma.”</p><p dir="ltr">Grant and her fellow producers, including the anchor Katie Couric and Marie herself (credited only as “Marie”), sought a filmmaker who understood how to capture “emotional complexity.” They found her in the director Lisa Cholodenko (<em>The Kids Are Alright</em>), who set the series’ candid tone by overseeing its first three episodes. “I found it to be a compelling yarn, and not much in a true-crime kind of way, but more as a human story about people’s fallibility and projections and missed perceptions,” Cholodenko explained to me over the phone. “On so many levels, it was just a really compelling story about the human condition.”</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">A<span class="smallcaps">s we sat inside her Culver City</span> office in mid-August, Grant tried to find a picture of the writers’ room she’d assembled months earlier. She remembered the space being covered in notes reconstructing the timelines of the cases to be depicted in <em>Unbelievable</em>, with large scrolls of paper taped to the walls—and “takeout containers in the middle of the room,” she added, laughing. The team had to organize all the information into eight installments to keep the series as faithful as possible to the source material, even as they changed details of the personal lives of the detectives and victims involved.</p><p dir="ltr">This research—or re-research—into Miller and Armstrong’s story was the first step in creating a pivotal scene in the premiere: the one in which the detectives lead Marie to recant her statement. It’s a sequence that demonstrates the series’ blunt, restrained tone.</p><p dir="ltr">The 11-page, 10-minute piece begins with the detectives assigned to Marie’s case summoning her for questioning. They’d learned of her troubled past from one of her foster parents, who’d suggested, without explicitly stating it, that because Marie had been acting out lately, perhaps she’d lied about her assault.</p><p dir="ltr">The conversation planted doubt in the detectives’ minds. So during their meeting with Marie inside a dreary interrogation room, they question her jumbled memory. <em>Didn’t she say she had dialed the phone with her toes, not her hands? Was she still tied up when she called for help or not?</em></p><figure><img alt="" height="711" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/Screen_Shot_2019_09_12_at_4.19.16_PM/7163730e5.png" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">In a page from the script of <em>Unbelievable</em>’s first episode, Marie (Kaitlyn Dever) struggles to explain the inconsistent details from her many recollections of her rape. (Netflix)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">Grant and the writers Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman observe the inherent tension in the detectives’ building doubt and Marie’s waning confidence. The men speak over Marie, take advantage of her confusion, and pressure her with loaded questions. They comfort her—“We don’t think you’re a bad person,” one says—then condescend to her. In reality, the confrontation lasted much longer than 10 minutes, but the scene retains dialogue from Miller and Armstrong’s story: Marie eventually concedes that she’s only “pretty positive” that the rape happened, and, okay, maybe it didn’t happen at all.</p><p dir="ltr">All of it is “re-traumatizing,” Cholodenko said. “This scene flips from [Marie] thinking they’re on her side ... to <em>Oh my God, I’m being harassed</em>.” Marie is forced to tell her story again, and a quick flashback shows pieces of the assault from her point of view. The original article also described the intruder’s thoughts, based on Miller and Armstrong’s interviews, but Grant wanted to depict only the victim’s perspective. “From the beginning, I said, ‘The [camerawork] on these assaults cannot be objective,’” she explained of the way the flashback rape scenes were shot. “It was in the DNA of the show.”</p><p dir="ltr">In a peer review of the interrogation conducted years later and cited by Miller and Armstrong in <em>A False Report</em>, the county sheriff described the interrogation as “bullying and coercive.” (“It wasn’t her job to convince me,” one of the detectives, who later apologized to Marie, told Miller and Armstrong. “In hindsight, it was my job to get to the bottom of it—and I didn’t.” The review led the Lynnwood Police Department to improve its training and protocol for rape victims and trauma.) Yet the series never characterizes the detectives as villains. They may have been determined to validate their own biases, but they were also officers with regrettably little training in sex crimes. “I didn’t think there was any point in telling a story in which a young woman is victimized by someone who is just a snarly, evil guy who doesn’t give a shit about women,” Grant said. “Far more interesting to me is a guy who’s a good husband, probably a good dad, probably good to his friends, who, working within the system handed to him as it’s constructed, ends up making incredibly bad choices.”</p><figure><img alt="" height="727" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/Screen_Shot_2019_09_12_at_4.20.52_PM/09fb78713.png" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">Toward the end of the confrontation scene, Dever’s Marie abruptly ends the conversation by “flipping a switch,” a move the real-life Marie employed to compartmentalize her emotions. (Netflix)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">The scene culminates in Dever’s Marie “flipping a switch”—a move, as the real-life Marie described it to Miller and Armstrong, in which she compartmentalizes her emotions when stressed. On-screen, Cholodenko illustrates Marie’s mind-set by deploying a ringing-in-the-ears sound effect as the camera zooms in on Marie, who abruptly stops crying. “I felt like, how do you show that cinematically when it’s something so internal?” Cholodenko admitted. “My objective was to show that she goes from this place of presence and unity with herself to a place where she has to wrestle internally and disassociate.”</p><p dir="ltr">“It was an extremely emotional day,” Dever recalled. “I remember repressing a lot of emotions of fear and anxiety, and I did feel like a little kid. I felt like I was in trouble, even though I knew, as Kaitlyn, Marie didn’t do anything wrong, ever. You start to get confused.”</p><p dir="ltr">The scene ends with Marie calmly looking up at the detectives and agreeing to recant, as if she hadn’t just been shaking before them, confused by their words and her memories, uncertain about whether she’d been forced to convince herself that she’d lied. “It broke me,” the real-life Marie told Miller and Armstrong in <em>A False Report</em>. “I lost everything.”</p><p dir="ltr">Toward the end of our conversation, Grant peered at an image her assistant had found of the writers’ room. But the shot—of a wall blanketed in neatly arranged, colorful Post-it Notes—wasn’t the one she’d wanted to show me, of the complicated timelines and details of Marie’s case. Grant shook her head. “It was <em>way</em> messier than that,” she said.</p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr"><em>U<span class="smallcaps">nbelievable</span></em><span class="smallcaps"> didn’t have to be</span> about Marie, the trauma of rape, and the precariousness of sex-crime investigations. It could have taken the <em>Mindhunter</em> route, focusing entirely on the investigators. It could have been a <em>Spotlight-</em>esque study of Miller and Armstrong, and the work that goes into reporting on the culture of disbelief. It could have explored any of the other fascinating subjects outlined in <em>A False Report</em>, such as Martha “Marty” Goddard, a survivor and victim advocate who played an instrumental role in enforcing sexual-assault laws and rape-kit protocol in the United States—with the help of the Playboy Foundation, intriguingly.</p><p dir="ltr">It could even have spent episodes on the serial rapist himself, who—spoiler alert, for viewers who haven’t read the story—was eventually caught and sentenced to 327 and a half years in prison. Miller and Armstrong devoted chapters to his background: He served in the military, began hunting victims while stationed in South Korea, and considered his need to assault women a “beast” to be fed. “One thing that I think is massively distressing in our culture is how we treat military veterans and their lack of reintegration into society,” Grant said. “That would have been a really interesting thing to dig into a little bit, but that’s a different show.”</p><p dir="ltr">Indeed, <em>Unbelievable</em> may not be an edge-of-your-seat crime thriller, but the clear-eyed, unvarnished treatment is the point. To tell a story about a real-life rape, to do it truthfully, is to show just how the drama isn’t built for TV—even if such an ethos potentially turns off viewers. Grant sighed when I asked about the importance of even attempting a TV series when an article, a book, and a podcast episode already exist. What is she really hoping for here?</p><p dir="ltr">If anything, she said, she wants to amplify the story—Netflix, as a global platform, has a wider reach than any of the previous iterations—and challenge viewers to see themselves in the players involved. “In an ideal world, [they would] say, ‘Wow, what assumptions am I making that I had no idea I was carrying?’” she explained. “That seemed interesting to me, to take someone on that journey.”</p><p>In fact, “I hope you’re there with the cops in their doubt [during the interrogation scene],” she continued. After all, if she’d made the confrontation black and white—with the detectives as the vile bad guys—there’d be no room for self-reflection. “[To make viewers] say, ‘Oh, that guy’s an asshole, I wouldn’t do that, I don’t need to look at myself, I don’t need to look at the ways I contribute to this cultural travesty’—that’s the easiest thing in the world! But to make people really uncomfortable?” She paused and shook her head. “I consider that discomfort a big success.”</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/HLMs_BMQ8dE" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Shirley Lihttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/shirley-li/?utm_source=feedBeth Dubber / Netflix / Klara Auerbach / The AtlanticNetflix’s <em>Unbelievable</em> Is a Different Sort of Drama About Sexual Assault2019-09-13T12:06:00-04:002019-09-13T13:57:51-04:00The new series<em> </em>aims to make viewers uncomfortable—but its creators say that’s the key to adapting a real-life rape case for the screen.https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/09/netflixs-unbelievable-different-sort-rape-drama/597946/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597985<p>In 1990, the songwriter Daniel Johnston <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WLCvD6plgQ">called into a radio show</a> in New Jersey from his parents’ bedroom in West Virginia to perform one of his songs, “Speeding Motorcycle.” Yo La Tengo, which had recorded its own version of the track, was set up to play with him, but live in the studio. “Daniel, first of all, I think I better introduce you to this band,” the DJ said as the musicians were gearing up to play. “Okay, hi, band,” Johnston replied. “Ready?”</p><p>His curtness might have seemed rude from anyone less gentle. Johnston, who died Wednesday at the age of 58, was revered by a generation of alt-rockers for his softness. An outsider artist who sang in a faltering voice about his ghosts and demons, Johnston was admired by Kurt Cobain and others for his troubled and often childlike songs, many of which were shaped by his experiences with mental illness. (Johnston was diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia.) His best-known track might be “Devil Town,” the opener off his album <em>1990</em>, although it only became famous years after its release, thanks to performances by the likes of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEdVaNSegXw">Bright Eyes</a>. “All my friends were vampires / Didn’t know they were vampires,” Johnston sings. “Turns out I was a vampire myself / In the devil town.”</p><p>Born in Sacramento, Johnston <a href="https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/music/2019-09-11/austin-songwriting-genius-daniel-johnston-dead-at-58/">grew up in West Virginia</a> in a Christian fundamentalist household, a setting that informed the eschatological imagery in his work. In the early 1980s, he relocated to Austin, where he recorded his punk-folk lullabies on homemade cassette tapes that he—and others on his behalf—distributed via local record stores. He helped make Austin weird: The city boasts a famous <a href="https://www.texasobserver.org/the-peoples-frog/">mural of a mutant bullfrog</a> drawn by Johnston for the cover of <em>Hi, How Are You?</em>, an unfinished 1983 cassette. When a Baja Fresh moved into the building and management threatened to tear the mural down in 2004, alarmed locals <a href="https://thaihowareyou.com/">rose up to save it</a>.</p><p>When punk broke into the mainstream <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103595/">in the 1990s</a>, Johnston, as with other artists of the grunge era, saw his boat lifted by the rising tide. Two of his songs, both of which first appeared on cassette, were included on the soundtrack to Larry Clark’s 1995 film, <em>Kids</em>. Like the movie itself, the selection of Johnston’s music was controversial. Both picks are tributes to Casper the Friendly Ghost, a figure who occupies a dark place in the artist’s personal cosmology: A few years earlier, while flying in a two-seater plane with his father, Johnston had a mental-health episode and, believing himself to be Casper, took the keys from the ignition and threw them out of the plane. As a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/apr/02/metallica">2005 documentary recounts</a>, both Johnstons survived the crash; a photograph taken immediately afterward shows the father and son in front of a church billboard that reads, “God promises a safe landing, but not a calm voyage.”</p><p>Taken as a whole, Johnston’s career shows how neuroatypical artists usually remain on the margins of the music industry, even when the scene reveres them. When Mary Lou Lord, Beck, and other alt-rockers rerecorded his songs, their versions reached far wider audiences. Despite his brush with broader appeal, Johnston never achieved commercial success. Half his recorded catalog was committed to cassette, and the other albums were published by a string of small labels. Johnston reached his artistic zenith in the 2000s, with a tribute album featuring covers by Vic Chesnutt, Tom Waits, Death Cab for Cutie, and others.</p><p>But by the time his drawings made it into the 2006 biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Johnston himself had mostly dropped off the map. Atlantic Records, the only major label to represent him, had let him go in 1996 after his debut album, <em>Fun</em>, proved to be a flop. He intermittently produced other recordings until 2012; while he endured hospitalizations all his life, in more recent years, they became frequent. A producer from Austin, Brian Beattie, has edited a final (<a href="https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/the-story-of-cult-music-icon-daniel-johnstons-lost-album.html">still unreleased</a>) album, which includes a seven-minute rendition of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” Members of the bands Fugazi, Wilco, and Built to Spill helped Johnston to mount a farewell tour in 2017.</p><p>While Johnston’s songs will endure, it’s hard not to think about the work he never finished, including the so-called lost record, <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2019/09/the-story-of-cult-music-icon-daniel-johnstons-lost-album.html"><em>If</em></a>. Neuroatypicality confers an outsider status that many curators and fans appreciate, at times because it suggests authenticity or purity, but it also often leaves artists vulnerable to poverty and poor health. Absent the efforts of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEg5ndDeLEA">popular artists</a> who admired him—and those of the record-store clerks, alt-weekly critics, and countless others who helped him spread his gospel—Johnston’s life might have passed in obscurity.</p><p>Johnston, who sang about eternity and redemption (and cartoon ghosts), made something permanent with his songwriting. “True love will find you in the end,” he sings, on one of his best and most covered songs. “This is a promise with a catch / Only if you’re looking can it find you / ’Cause true love is searching too.”</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/SASWWfkPfCg" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Kriston Cappshttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/kriston-capps/?utm_source=feedSimone Cecchetti / Corbis / GettyDaniel Johnston, the Folk Poet of Devil Town2019-09-13T11:07:05-04:002019-09-13T11:50:00-04:00While the songs of the influential musician, who died at 58, will endure, it’s hard to say that he was properly appreciated in his time.https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/09/daniel-johnston/597985/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597541<h2>The Case Against Paper Straws</h2><p><i>Paper straws are still a single-use, disposable consumer item, Annie Lowrey <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/paper-straws-wont-stop-climate-change/596302/?utm_source=feed">wrote last month</a>—a greener option than plastic, but not a green one.</i></p><hr><p dir="ltr">Annie Lowrey’s article on the shortcomings of paper straws provides a nuanced look at an issue that has captured the public’s attention. She’s right: Paper straws are not going to solve the ocean plastics crisis. Changing our relationship with single-use plastics will require action from the private sector, government, and individuals.</p><p dir="ltr">At the same time, let’s not lose sight of just how ubiquitous plastic straws are.</p><p dir="ltr">Plastic straws and stirrers are consistently among the top 10 items found during the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup each year. On a single day in 2018, volunteers around the world collected more than 3.6 million from beaches and waterways. Small and lightweight, they’re easily left on the beach or leaked out of waste-management systems and into the ocean. Just one can harm a sea turtle.</p><p dir="ltr">I am encouraged by how eager all of us are to “skip the straw.” Let’s make sure our next steps are even more meaningful.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Janis Searles Jones</strong><br><em>CEO, Ocean Conservancy<br>
Portland, Ore.</em></p><hr><p dir="ltr">I applaud Ms. Lowrey’s explanation of the not-so-straightforward environmental trade-offs we make when trying to “go green.” She is completely right when she says, “Paper straws put the lie to the belief that we can consume our way out of the problems created by consumerism.” But that is only half of the discussion.</p><p dir="ltr">Yes, consumers need to change wasteful consumption habits. But consumers alone do not have the power to solve the plastic problem plaguing the environment. Plastic manufacturers need to participate! Not by eliminating single-use plastics—some are absolutely necessary (think medical equipment such as syringes)—but by creating plastic materials that mimic natural, biologic recycling processes (think tree trunk decomposing on the forest floor). </p><p dir="ltr">Work is being done to further this line of thinking. Plastics manufacturing is a huge, profitable industry. Industrial change of this scale for the benefit of the Earth will be difficult but absolutely necessary. Halting the damage being done to our environment requires all parties to participate.</p><p dir="ltr"><strong>Stacy Stephens</strong><br><em>Denver, Colo.</em></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/st2KzRmPQ-k" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Justin Sullivan / GettyReaders Respond: The Case Against Paper Straws2019-09-13T11:00:00-04:002019-09-13T11:00:27-04:00“Paper straws are not going to solve the ocean plastics crisis,” a reader writes. But they’re a good first step.https://www.theatlantic.com/letters/archive/2019/09/paper-straws-are-still-better-plastic/597541/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597967<p dir="ltr">HOUSTON—Overhead, the little red plane with the white stripe went around and around, circling and droning, circling and droning—impossible to ignore, pointless to pay attention to. It was a stunt, and by this mention alone, the Trump campaign may feel it got a return on its investment, <a href="https://abc13.com/politics/trump-to-fly-message-over-houston-democratic-debate/5533355/">reportedly $7,500</a>. <span class="smallcaps">SOCIALISM WILL KILL HOUSTON’S ECONOMY! VOTE TRUMP 2020</span> read the big blue banner trailing the plane, for anyone who looked up.</p><p dir="ltr">Down below last night, the 10 leading Democratic presidential candidates were onstage arguing over the details of their grand plans for health insurance, gun control, and combatting climate change—justifying and explaining their proposals in a way the president has rarely done.</p><p dir="ltr">In presidential-primary debates, Republicans are typically asked what they’re going to do. Democrats are asked that too—plus questions about how they’re going to do it. There’s a small-<em>c</em> conservative sensibility underlying that approach from many in the political media, an assumption that the country doesn’t want or isn’t prepared to handle significant change, because Congress hasn’t made that change already—despite <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/most-americans-support-stricter-gun-laws-new-poll-says">what</a> favorable public polling may <a href="https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer-national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/">suggest</a> about some of the Democrats’ biggest proposals. Reporters often adopt the voice of a hypothetical centrist voter who’s inherently skeptical of just how far to the left the Democratic Party has moved. This mentality drives professional Democrats nuts: “I always say, the status quo is the strongest lobbyist in D.C.,” Representative Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who was in town to endorse and promote Senator Kamala Harris of California, told me after the debate.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/elizabeth-warren-health-care-plan/597961/?utm_source=feed">Read: The question Elizabeth Warren doesn’t want to answer</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">But the candidates might as well get used to it. As long as Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is running the Senate, major Democratic proposals are going nowhere; his power as majority leader—and a filibuster rule that requires 60 votes for most legislation—makes the chances of success unlikely. As the 2020 primary cranked up to its next level of seriousness with the third debate last night, so did that big question for the Democrats onstage: How exactly are they going to do what they’ve proposed?</p><p dir="ltr">Most of the candidates said they were eager for a detailed discussion. Yet none were ready to embrace the challenge entirely. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, for example, tried to avoid directly answering a question about whether middle-class taxes would go up under Medicare for All—even though Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose plan she’s endorsed, acknowledges they would. (He’s argued that Americans would save money overall on their health-care costs.) And Warren has still never quite explained how she proposes to pass the 2 percent wealth tax that is at the core of her candidacy. Meanwhile, the moderators wanted to know, what is Joe Biden’s plan to counter China’s economic rise if not the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/06/joe-biden-wont-say-if-he-supports-tpp-trade-deal/592591/?utm_source=feed">he once helped sell</a> but now opposes? How would Sanders get any of his major proposals through the Senate when he still supports keeping the filibuster in place? How would former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas build support in Congress for mandatory assault-rifle buybacks? The answers largely remain mysteries.</p><p dir="ltr">Eventually the <em>how</em> can catch up to politicians. Consider Republicans’ “repeal and replace” pledge. For years, GOP leaders promised to release a health-care plan that managed to retain all the popular elements of the Affordable Care Act. House Republicans voted dozens of times to roll back the ACA, with Democrats in the Senate ultimately blocking their efforts. In 2017, a repeal push in the upper chamber only failed because of the late Senator John McCain of Arizona and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/john-mccains-no-vote-sinks-republicans-skinny-repeal-plan/535209/?utm_source=feed">his famous thumbs-down</a>. Yet at no point has a full replacement plan emerged, even as Donald Trump has promised that he’s not done trying to get rid of Obamacare.</p><p dir="ltr">Some of the candidates last night rejected getting in the weeds, preferring to campaign in clear, bold swings. “Frankly, I think this discussion has given the American public a headache. What they want to know is that they’re going to have health care and cost will not be a barrier to getting it,” Harris said at one point, trying to short-circuit a long exchange on health care. “This reminds everybody of what they cannot stand about Washington: scoring points against each other, poking at each other, and telling each other that—my plan, your plan,” South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said a few minutes later, trying to muscle into an exchange between Biden and former Housing Secretary Julián Castro. “Yeah, that’s called the Democratic-primary election, Pete,” Castro fired back. “That’s called an election.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/beto-orourke-take-ar-15s/597958/?utm_source=feed">Read: Beto O’Rourke’s attempt to shift the Overton window on guns</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">“I think it makes sense, asking how you’re going to get it done,” Castro told me afterward. “Democrats tend to be a little more introspective about how you’re actually going to do things. On the whole, I think that that’s good.” At the first debate, Castro drew attention with his proposal to make crossing the American border illegally a civil charge instead of a criminal one. I asked him whether he worries that getting too deep into detail could backfire on Democrats. He told me that was a great question, and he’d have to think about it.</p><p dir="ltr">“There’s a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats: Republicans talk about all the things they’re going to kill and not do, so it’s easy to not do things. How much detail do you need for that?” Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders’s campaign, told me in the spin room. “Democrats, to varying degrees, are talking about doing new and different things, so that requires explaining.”</p><p dir="ltr">“The expectation is that Trump’s going to do nothing, and for Democrats, the biased expectation is ‘You can’t get it done,’ so it starts with a negative,” echoes Brad Woodhouse, a veteran Democratic operative who’s now the executive director of the Obamacare advocacy group Protect Our Care.</p><p dir="ltr">Needless to say, the level of detail in a proposal doesn’t always correspond to its seriousness. Just look at Trump. Remember how Mexico was going to pay for the border wall? In the spring of 2016, after much pestering from the press, his campaign <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/politics/memo-explains-how-donald-trump-plans-to-pay-for-border-wall/2007/">produced a two-page memo</a>, a rare dive for the campaign into actual specifics (though it’s barely anything compared with most of the plans 2020 Democrats have released). The memo described how Trump would squeeze the money from Mexico overnight through transaction fees on remittances sent by people in the United States and through raising the price of visas. The administration never pursued that approach once Trump won the presidency, and these days, it’s pulling money for the wall <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/757463817/these-are-the-11-border-projects-getting-funds-intended-for-military-constructio">out of military bases</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">“Republicans get a pass on a whole lot,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who was walking around the spin room as a surrogate for Warren, her home-state senator. I asked Healey why she thinks that’s so. “If I had the answer to that question,” she said, “I’d do something about it.”</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/IJWZnnErpmQ" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Edward-Isaac Doverehttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/edward-isaac-dovere/?utm_source=feedEric Gay / AP‘How Are You Going to Pass That?’ Befuddled Democrats at the Debate2019-09-13T10:30:49-04:002019-09-13T13:51:31-04:00The candidates onstage heard a version of that big question over and over again.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/democratic-debate-democrats-explain-plans-houston/597967/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597691<p>College libraries <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/college-students-arent-checking-out-books/590305/?utm_source=feed">may be reducing the number of books stored on their shelves</a>, but plenty of novel-worthy plots and fascinating characters still play out on campus and congregate in the classroom. After all, challenging assignments like the drama-class trust exercises in Susan Choi’s most recent novel can influence students’ thinking for years to come. Academic characters<strong> </strong>in John Williams’s <em>Stoner</em> and Kingsley Amis’s <em>Lucky Jim </em>conduct research that shapes and reflects their identities. The writer Nicholson Baker, best known for his vividly detailed fiction, found more than 700 pages’ worth of quotidian dramas in the schools where he taught during a short stint as a substitute teacher.</p><p>Sociologists such as Aldon Morris and Wendy Leo Moore document the institutional barriers that scholars of color have historically faced in academia. And Jennine Capó Crucet describes in a book of essays how she navigated those barriers to become a professor herself.</p><blockquote>
<p dir="ltr"><em>Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together </em>Atlantic<em> stories on books that share similar ideas. ​Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email. </em></p>
</blockquote><hr><h3>What We’re Reading</h3><figure><img alt="" height="448" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/substitute_teacher/26e279139.gif" width="672"></figure><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/pity-the-substitute-teacher/497519/?utm_source=feed"><strong>Pity the substitute teacher</strong></a><br>
“Baker’s [work shows his] skill at doing what is too rarely done—and what his book convinced me all of us teachers should do at least once a year: Follow a student through a whole hectic day in our own schools to soak up the experience.”</p><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><small>📚 <em>Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids</em>, by Nicholson Baker</small></strong></p><hr><figure><img alt="" height="448" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/trust_exercises/9d45ce8e5.jpg" width="672"></figure><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/05/susan-chois-trust-exercise-review-fiction-vs-reality/588763/?utm_source=feed"><strong>Susan Choi’s taut drama-school narrative asks: Where does art end and reality begin?</strong></a><br>
“It’s a meta work of construction and deconstruction, building a persuasive fictional world and then showing you the girders, the scaffolding underneath, and how it’s all been welded together. It’s also a work that lives in the gray area between art and reality: the space where alchemy happens.”</p><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><small>📚<em> Trust Exercise</em>, by Susan Choi</small></strong></p><hr><figure><img alt="" height="378" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/Jennine_Cap%C3%B3_Crucet/f2e449eb3.jpg" width="672"></figure><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/09/jennine-capo-crucet-my-time-among-the-whites-excerpt/597277/?utm_source=feed"><strong>How I became an ‘accidental’ professor</strong></a><br>
“I genuinely did not think I was smart enough to be a professor … But I knew … that I wanted to be someone who made knowledge, who got to live in books and in theories about books, who got to spend her life writing while teaching future generations of writers how to pick apart the books they loved and discover how they were built.”</p><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><small>📚 An excerpt from <em>My Time Among the Whites: Notes on an Unfinished Education</em>, by Jennine Capó Crucet<br>
📚 <em>Make Your Home Among Strangers</em>, by Jennine Capó Crucet</small></strong></p><hr><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/black_academic/58b988020.jpg" width="672"></figure><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/the-plight-of-the-black-academic/420237/?utm_source=feed"><strong>The plight of the black academic</strong></a><br>
“Research shows [that] when these professors are in the numerical minority, their experiences aren’t all that different from what [W. E. B.] Du Bois encountered as he attempted to navigate higher education in the early 20th century: exclusion, marginalization, and the consistent message that, as a black person, he was not suited for the academy and that his ideas were unwelcome.”</p><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><small>📚<em> The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology</em>, by Aldon Morris<br>
📚 <em>Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression</em>, by Joe R. Feagin<br>
📚 <em>Reproducing Racism: White Space, Elite Law Schools, and Racial Inequality</em>, by Wendy Leo Moore</small></strong></p><hr><figure><img alt="" height="554" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/fictional_academics/cf73af74e.jpg" width="672"></figure><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/01/brief-taxonomy-fictional-academics/581365/?utm_source=feed"><strong>A brief taxonomy of fictional academics</strong></a><br>
“You know how dogs look like their owners? The bouncy, athletic guy matches his golden retriever, and the tall, skinny lady with a long nose, her greyhound? Likewise, fictional academics resemble their work.”</p><p style="text-align: center;"><strong><small>📚 <em>Hedda Gabler</em>, by Henrik Ibsen<br>
📚 <em>Lucky Jim</em>, by Kingsley Amis<br>
📚 <em>Stoner</em>, by John Williams<br>
📚 <em>Talent</em>, by Juliet Lapidos</small></strong></p><hr><h3>The Reference Desk</h3><figure><img alt="" height="483" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/05/ref_desk/3655ddc84.jpg" width="672"></figure><p><small>(<a href="https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e4-6d8c-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99">New York Public Library</a>)</small></p><p>This week’s question is “a slightly sideways cry for help” from Jessica:</p><blockquote>
<p>We read to my mom every day—she is 89, physically incapable, and has a bit of a cognition challenge—but we are having problems finding good books to read. We have encountered too many books that are fine when read in your own head, but do not read well out loud, or in which the plot lines are a bit too mobile, or where there is an unpleasant aspect to the tale that comes up suddenly or feels gratuitous.<strong> </strong>We are reading <em>Paradise of the Blind</em> right now (gorgeously written), and she has recently enjoyed <em>Tesla: Man Out of Time</em>, and <em>Fly Girls: How Five Daring Young Women Defied All the Odds</em>, among many others.</p>
</blockquote><p>What a lovely way to spend time with your mother. My family had a similar tradition of reading aloud at the dinner table, and one of our favorite titles was the memoir <em><a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/review-of-rocket-boys-a-memoir-164531716/">Rocket Boys</a></em>, about a group of West Virginia teenagers inspired to build their own rockets when Sputnik passes over their coal-mining hometown. In general, memoirs should provide a good straightforward narrative to read aloud; you could check out those of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/14-books-atlantic-staffers-are-reading-summer/592852/?utm_source=feed">Françoise Gilot,</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/06/14-books-atlantic-staffers-are-reading-summer/592852/?utm_source=feed">Ruth Reichl,</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/11/becoming-michelle-obama-first-ladys-resolve-amid-scrutiny/575674/?utm_source=feed">Michelle Obama</a>.</p><p>If you haven’t tried them already, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-hypnotic-genius-of-elena-ferrante/403198/?utm_source=feed">Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet</a> could be just what you’re looking for: gorgeous, immersive, and long enough to keep you busy for quite a while. I wouldn’t say there’s unnecessary violence, but do be aware that the series has <a href="https://www.bustle.com/p/the-sexual-violence-in-my-brilliant-friend-is-true-to-life-the-novels-but-its-not-easy-to-stomach-week-to-week-13234541">some painful themes</a>. Because your mother enjoyed Tesla’s biography, she might also like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Thomas-t.html" style="font-style: italic;">The Invention of Everything Else</a>—a sweet, beautifully written historical novel imagining the inventor’s friendship with a chambermaid at the hotel where he spent his last years. To your point about linear plot, though, the flashbacks could be tough to navigate. It sounds like you have a couple of different readers, and if each of you takes on one of the alternating perspectives, that might help to keep the chronology straight.</p><p>My own grandmother was from a generation that memorized poems in school, and she held on to some of her favorite lines well into her 90s. So while you mention novels and history as the particular genres you’re looking for, I wonder whether some classic poetry might also be worth a try. Tennyson’s “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45359/the-lady-of-shalott-1832">The Lady of Shalott</a>,” for instance, is sonically delightful, and if your mother was familiar with it as a student, hearing it might even jog her memory to recite a few lines with you.</p><p><em bis_size='{"x":67,"y":4467,"w":634,"h":110,"abs_x":259,"abs_y":6680}'>Write to the Books Briefing team at <a bis_size='{"x":348,"y":4467,"w":253,"h":23,"abs_x":540,"abs_y":6680}' href="mailto:booksbriefing@theatlantic.com?subject=Books%20Briefing%20Reference%20Desk%20question%3A&amp;body=Help%2C%20Books%20Briefing%20Reference%20Desk%3A%0A%0AMy%20question%20concerns%20...">booksbriefing@theatlantic.com</a> or reply directly to this email with any of your reading-related dilemmas. We might feature one of your questions in a future edition of the Books Briefing and offer a few books or related </em>Atlantic<em bis_size='{"x":351,"y":4554,"w":245,"h":23,"abs_x":543,"abs_y":6767}'> pieces that might help you out.</em></p><hr><blockquote>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>About us: </strong>This week’s newsletter is written by <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/rosa-inocencio-smith/?utm_source=feed">Rosa Inocencio Smith</a>. She’s looking everywhere for her college paper on <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-poet-laureate-of-englishness/537864/?utm_source=feed"><em>A Shropshire Lad</em></a><em>.</em></p>
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</blockquote><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/JjkqEVkHtss" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Rosa Inocencio Smithhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/rosa-inocencio-smith/?utm_source=feedSTLJB / ShutterstockThe Books Briefing: Campus Life Is Full of Plot Twists2019-09-13T10:30:00-04:002019-09-13T10:58:22-04:00Please turn to the next page in your syllabus: your weekly guide to the best in books.https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/09/back-to-campus-books-briefing/597691/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-598000<p>All of the ingredients seemed right. The Democratic 2020 hopefuls were lined up onstage in the gymnasium at Texas Southern University, a historically black university in Houston, Texas, for the third debate. Several of the candidates had announced plans to pump billions of dollars into HBCUs—institutions founded primarily after the Civil War to educate black people shut out of the rest of higher education. One of the candidates, Senator Kamala Harris, is herself an HBCU alum—of Howard University, one of the country’s most illustrious black colleges. And the debate was being held in Texas, one of six states—along with Oklahoma, Maryland, Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania—<a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/They-Wanted-Desegregation/242930/?key=yWNyUrseiPjtDmMwAoIBOZwbrrRkO0WydUzLqn4XP46AnQRAxXkfv_aWNU0aC_LES3dIZlRid3ZQTEpiLTRDaDlTVFg3bVBYWDZYUTEzQjhxMGFxSzlNbkxjSQ">that still needs to prove</a> to the Department of Education that it has desegregated its higher-education system, due in large part to how it has treated its black colleges.</p><p>But the ingredients spoiled on the shelf. During last night’s debate, mention of historically black colleges was little more than a guaranteed applause line. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/05/howard-universitys-president-why-america-needs-hbcus/589582/?utm_source=feed">HBCUs are still training</a> and educating the next generation. Harris pressed the importance of the colleges in training black teachers. Senator Bernie Sanders said he would make the colleges debt-free. But the candidates—despite having, in some cases, robust plans to boost HBCUs—were given few opportunities to discuss those plans.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/05/howard-universitys-president-why-america-needs-hbcus/589582/?utm_source=feed">Read: Why America needs its HBCUs</a>]</i></p><p>HBCUs were not the only education issue that received short shrift during the debate. Generally, substantive conversation about the fundamental reform of education in America took a back seat to health care, foreign policy, and climate. The candidates onstage were given only a brief spell to discuss their plans to revamp the nation’s education system. In the hurried few moments that they did receive, the candidates fell back on their bullet points. The education secretary needs to be an educator, Senator Elizabeth Warren insisted. Teachers need to be paid more, Harris said. We need to invest in colleges, Sanders pressed.</p><p>The lack of discussion about education policy—higher-education policy, in particular—was glaringly apparent, given how much attention the candidates have paid to student debt and college affordability during the primary cycle. Since 2007, the Democratic Party has <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/06/democrats-debt-cancellation-free-college/591043/?utm_source=feed">radically shifted on the methods</a> it is willing to propose to tackle the student-debt crisis. Still, there is genuine disagreement among the candidates who took the stage in Houston about what exactly a new administration should do, as opposed to with primary education, where all the candidates seem to agree that increased federal grants for low-income students seem like a good idea. Some hopefuls, such as Sanders and Warren, view debt cancellation or tuition-free college as the answer; others, such as Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar, have backed a more metered approach.</p><p>Instead, the education-heavy section of the debate centered on K–12, and on teacher pay and charter schools in particular. In the shadow of the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/01/teachers-are-launching-a-rebellion/580975/?utm_source=feed">teacher strikes</a> that have swept across the nation in the past few years, several candidates have proposed raising salaries for teachers. But increasing teacher pay would not radically transform schools in the way that the Green New Deal would combat climate change or free college would revolutionize higher education.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/01/teachers-are-launching-a-rebellion/580975/?utm_source=feed">Read: America’s teachers are furious</a>]</i></p><p>Harris, Sanders, Warren, and other 2020 Democrats have pointed to school funding—and rethinking the link between property taxes and money for schools—as one way to revamp public schools in America. Throughout the three debates so far, however, the subject has received little attention, and details about how exactly candidates would reform that link are scant.</p><p>There is, of course, a finite amount of time in each presidential debate—even if that time is three hours—and sandwiching every pet issue into that time is difficult. But the executive branch’s role in education is felt most by the nation’s colleges and universities, while much of K–12 education is handled by state and local governments. That candidates from one of the two major parties were not given time to debate the merits of their plans to oversee higher education is an oversight in itself.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/fhU5DUA6zyY" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Adam Harrishttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/adam-harris/?utm_source=feedrosarioscalia/ Shutterstock Frederick M. Brown / Stringer / Ethan Miller / Chip Somodevilla / Getty / Arsh Raziuddin / The AtlanticThe Democrats Aren’t Talking About Education Issues They Can Change2019-09-13T10:18:53-04:002019-09-13T11:47:19-04:00Candidates were given little time at the third presidential debate to discuss their proposals to transform college.https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/democratic-debate-where-was-education/598000/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-598003<p><em>Every week, </em><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/friendship-files/?utm_source=feed"><em>The Friendship Files</em></a><em> features a conversation between </em>The Atlantic<em>’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.</em></p><p>This week she talks with two Hungarian master chess players: Judit Polgár, who is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/nyregion/02chess.html">widely considered</a> the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Judit-Polgar">best female chess player</a> of <a href="https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180822-what-we-can-learn-from-female-chess-prodigies">all time</a>, and Anna Rudolf, who grew up idolizing Judit as a child. Anna became an elite player herself, and ended up meeting and befriending Judit (who is now retired) through the Hungarian chess community. In this interview, they talk about the social scene at chess competitions and facing sexism in a male-heavy environment, and Anna discusses what it’s like to become friends with your childhood hero.</p><blockquote>
<h3><strong>The Friends: </strong></h3>
<p><span class="smallcaps">Judit Polgár</span>, 43, a retired chess grand master and creator of the Global Chess Festival who lives in Budapest<br><span class="smallcaps">Anna Rudolf</span>, 32, a chess international master and broadcaster who lives in Zaragoza, Spain</p>
</blockquote><p>This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.</p><hr><p><strong>Julie Beck:</strong> I don't know much at all about chess at the professional or elite level. How do you get from just being a really good chess player to doing it full-time?</p><p><strong>Judit Polgá</strong><strong>r:</strong> I started playing chess when I was 5 years old, so it was kind of like my mother tongue. To become a professional, you have to train a lot, which I did from a very early age. Of course, it helps if your character is very competitive and you have patience and perseverance.</p><p>Then I was competing quite a lot. Competitions last about 10 days or two weeks. I was homeschooled, so in this way I could train on a daily basis for many hours. And then I was traveling all over the world.</p><p><strong>Anna Rudolf:</strong> I was never a professional chess player. I would call it semi-professional. I kept on going to school because I didn't think that my chess skills were good enough for making it a full profession. I, of course, always loved playing chess. And I competed, and I wanted to get into the Olympic team. But I wanted to have something else as a job, because I didn't think I would get anywhere near the heights of Judit. It's very difficult to be Judit Polgár.</p><p><strong>Judit:</strong> We had different lives. She was going to school; I wasn't. I have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polg%C3%A1r">two</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Polg%C3%A1r">older sisters</a> and I grew up in a very special environment. My parents devoted their lives in order to raise us to become professional chess champions. So for me it was not really a question of <em>What is going to be my work? </em>I started to become internationally successful starting at the age of 9. But in Anna's case, of course, she was going to school, and actually she was a member of the [Hungarian] Olympic team. She was always so dedicated in the team.</p><p><strong>Beck:</strong> How would you describe the social scene of high-level chess? Is it friendly? Is it competitive?</p><p><strong>Judit:</strong> On the highest level, of course there's a lot of competitiveness and drive in the players. They really want to win. But it’s normal that the players are also just friends. Even very close friends. Or rivals, but in a healthy way. It is common that people go out after the game for a walk or they have dinner together. [During the game], they would like to tear each other apart, but after, they are friends.</p><p><strong>Anna:</strong> In chess, we have olympiads every two years, and in the years when there's no chess olympiad, we compete in the European championships. That’s where I started to get to know Judit, because in those team events, the different nations tend to go have dinner together, walk together, go on excursions together. Those are bonding moments.</p><p><strong>Beck:</strong> Anna, you said that you admired Judit long before you ever met or knew her. What was it like to actually get to know somebody you used to be starstruck by?</p><figure><img alt="Anna Rudolf and Judit Polgar." height="504" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/Live_streaming_at_Judits_Global_Chess_Festival_in_Budapest_Oct_2017/e7f42907b.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">Anna Rudolf (left) and Judit Polgár (right) live-streaming events from the Global Chess Festival in Budapest in October 2017. (Courtesy of Anna Rudolf)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Anna:</strong> She's been my idol ever since I was a kid. Everybody knows Judit in Hungary.</p><p>The moment I got onto the team and ended up being able to sit at the same dinner table with my role models, I felt like, <em>Oh my God, am I dreaming? </em>I like the games of Judit and Peter Leko, and they were both on the team. They were so friendly and kind. What was really curious to me was that these idols I've had, they were just like real human beings, not some distant star that wouldn't even talk to you. You could talk to them about any topic; you would have a good laugh. They were like normal people, you know?</p><p><strong>Beck:</strong> Have you and Judit ever competed against each other?</p><p><strong>Anna: </strong>[When I was 11], my family and I traveled to Budapest so that I could play in a simultaneous exhibition against her. I wore my favorite white pants. That was the one time that I played against her, and I remember that I got crushed immediately.</p><p><strong>Beck:</strong> What is a simultaneous exhibition?</p><p><strong>Judit:</strong> You have to visualize it like there are a lot of chessboards set up next to each other in a circle, and then I'm playing against, let’s say, 20 people at the same time in one room. I make my move, and then I move from one table to another. It takes about two or three hours, this exhibition.</p><p><strong>Anna: </strong>After the game, she politely shook my hand and signed my score sheet. I guarded that piece of paper as a treasure. It had a smiling face in the letter <em>J</em>, which I really liked. To this day, she signs her name like that.</p><p><strong>Beck: </strong>How did you go from being on the team together to being friends outside of chess?</p><p><strong>Judit:</strong> Actually, we were not [exactly] teammates in the Olympics, because Anna was playing in the ladies’ team and I was playing in the open section with the guys. Later on, we started to work together. Anna offered to help promote the Global Chess Festival [which I created]. This is going to be the fifth year. We were brainstorming, talking, and of course when we were doing that, we started talking about private-life things. The friendship was going deeper the more time we spent with each other. [And last year], at the chess world championship, Anna was doing the commentary, I was the host, and we were working every day like six, seven, eight hours.</p><blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Happy Birthday to the strongest female player in history, my childhood hero, role model and friend (lucky I am!), <a href="https://twitter.com/GMJuditPolgar?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@GMJuditPolgar</a>.❤️ After <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CarlsenCaruana?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CarlsenCaruana</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/NorwayChess?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NorwayChess</a> the next project we're working on together is Judit's <a href="https://twitter.com/ChessConnectsUs?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ChessConnectsUs</a>: <a href="https://t.co/QNJQ0iVOV2">https://t.co/QNJQ0iVOV2</a> 🤘 <a href="https://t.co/AoMCPfsRy0">pic.twitter.com/AoMCPfsRy0</a></p>
— Anna Rudolf (@Anna_Chess) <a href="https://twitter.com/Anna_Chess/status/1153758167232319488?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 23, 2019</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p><strong>Beck:</strong> Any standout memories from the world championship or the festival?</p><p><strong>Anna:</strong> Judit, do you remember the one night that we finished filming so late? I think it was two years ago; this is one day before the festival. We have been filming the whole day, different videos that we wanted to show on the broadcast. It was extremely late. The restaurant is about to close; we can barely get food. But even though we’re exhausted and the next day we have to wake up very early, it was still a very good mood. Just laughing throughout the whole dinnertime. It's difficult to describe what made that atmosphere so special.</p><p><strong>Judit:</strong> I think what makes it special is, our attitudes are very similar. We do something we love, we try to do things we believe in, and we are very passionate about it. The flow goes for many hours. It creates this atmosphere with a lot of laughing and humor and irony. You need all of this to survive all kinds of difficult and tiring situations. I think it was even more important when we were doing the world-championship match. It’s a great thing that you can count on: that whatever goes wrong, the other [person] will try to pull you out of it.</p><p><strong>Beck:</strong> My perception from the outside is that chess can be kind of a male-dominated world. Do you feel like it's helpful to have a female friend who understands the world you're in?</p><figure><img alt="Judit Polgár and Anna Rudolph in Norway." height="518" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/At_an_excursion_in_Iceland_Nov_2015/7d23d2c04.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">Judit and Anna took a trip to Norway in November 2015. (Courtesy of Anna Rudolph)</figcaption></figure><p><strong>Judit:</strong> I think, generally speaking, whenever you are successful, you will meet more guys around you than women. You have to have your fighting spirit, your perseverance. I was always competing with the guys from a very young age. It didn't cause me too much trouble. Sometimes I was the only lady who was playing in the competitions, but I have the kind of character that I didn't mind.</p><p>For Anna, people think that things come easy for her because she's a blondie. But actually, I think she works more than most of the guys.</p><p><strong>Anna:</strong> Likewise. Even though you are not a blondie.</p><p><strong>Judit:</strong> I've not had to face very bizarre situations like [Anna did] when she was 20 years old. [She’s a] pretty, young, nice girl. And she plays incredibly well. She made the tournament of her life. And just because she was a girl and a blondie, people started to accuse her of cheating. It’s not so easy to handle, to be accused of something like that.</p><p><strong>Anna:</strong> That was in 2007. It was an open tournament in France. I was leading the tournament after four rounds. With just one round to go, I was still leading, and that's when the arbiter came to me and said, “There are some people who think that you may be using assistance in your games.” The arbiter himself and the organizers, they didn't believe it, but they wanted to make sure that people were not complaining. So they took away my backpack and they checked my lip balm because I’d had it on the table. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/crosswords/chess/13chess.html">The accusers thought that I had a microchip in my lip balm</a> that was connected to wireless internet in my backpack and whenever I opened the tin of the lip balm, I would see the right move to make on the board.</p><p><strong>Judit:</strong> That was a huge blow and a teaching from life to her of how unfair it can be, but you have to fight on. Right?</p><p><strong>Anna:</strong> That's true. And you also get some comments, [someone saying] he would never lose to a woman or something very sexist along that line.</p><p><strong>Judit:</strong> Oh, there have been many sexist lines like that. The guys can, many times, barely believe that your results are just good because you're good. Of course, you shouldn't think everybody thinks that, but there are some who think that way. For handling such a situation, you have to have a strong character to go on.</p><p><strong>Beck:</strong> To wrap up, can you describe each other's style of playing chess? Does it reflect your personality?</p><p><strong>Judit:</strong> I haven't seen so many games of Anna’s. In those team competitions playing for Hungary, I know that she was playing very long games. She had this fighting spirit. Her strengths were her focus and dedication. Generally speaking, you're a person who prepares as much as you can for a game, and then you focus and you give the maximum.</p><p><strong>Anna:</strong> I obviously can say the same about Judit. She puts 120 percent in every game. The determination, the focus—they are among the many reasons why she got to be the only female player that made it into the top 10 [players in the world]. Judit is famous for her fighting spirit, for her aggressive attack in chess. She’s one of the best attacking players in the world. That is among women and men together.</p><p>I agree that your personality over the chessboard reflects how you are in life. Even though Judit doesn't compete anymore, she's still extremely passionate about chess and she promotes it in every way possible. She wants to promote the message of the Global Chess Festival: that chess can unite people regardless of your gender, your age, your profession, your income. It is a connecting bridge between many types of different people who may not be able to communicate with each other. But they can play and understand each other through the game, or they can become friends like we did.</p><hr><p><em>If you or someone you know should be featured on The Friendship Files, get in touch at <a href="mailto:friendshipfiles@theatlantic.com">friendshipfiles@theatlantic.com</a> and tell us a bit about what makes the friendship unique.</em></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/LV8wyrLtn2I" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Julie Beckhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/julie-beck/?utm_source=feedWENJIA TANGBefriending the Queen of Chess2019-09-13T10:00:00-04:002019-09-13T13:25:02-04:00“These idols I’ve had, they were just like real human beings, not some distant star that wouldn’t even talk to you.”https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/09/female-chess-masters-talk-sexism-and-friendship/598003/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597973<p dir="ltr">In a recent piece in <em>The Atlantic</em>, I urged top black athletic recruits to attend historically black colleges. One of the more absurd criticisms I received afterward was that Martin Luther King Jr.—a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/martin-luther-king-jr-timeline/552548/?utm_source=feed">graduate of Morehouse College</a>—wouldn’t approve of such a suggestion.</p><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/DavidWohl/status/1170058255977996288">Bad enough</a> that <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/5/jemele-hill-pens-racist-call-blacks-leave-white-co/">I was called a racist</a>. <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/black-athletes-should-leave-white-colleges-jemele-hill-writes-in-controversial-op-ed">A segregationist</a>. Even <a href="https://twitter.com/DiamondandSilk/status/1170088070747738112">a black supremacist</a> —whatever that is. Worse still, by daring to challenge black athletes to redirect their talents to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), I was somehow betraying King, along with the color-blind vision he supposedly laid out in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. One reader sent me a screenshot of that speech, insisting that I read it and take notes.</p><p>In that same spirit, I would direct that reader and others to Harry Belafonte’s memoir, <em>My Song</em>, in which the entertainer and activist relayed a <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-other-side-of-martin-luther-kings-dream_b_5a526e7ee4b0ee59d41c0bdf">sobering story about King</a>, a dear friend of his who spoke at Belafonte’s New York apartment a week before his assassination. “What deeply troubles me now,” King told the group, “is that for all the steps we’ve taken toward integration, I’ve come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house.” In his final years, King pretty clearly came to the understanding that no amount of integration would, on its own, make up for a long history of economic injustice. That hasn’t stopped conservatives from invoking “I Have a Dream” against affirmative action—and an idea like mine—or from putting themselves forward as the true defenders of race neutrality.</p><p dir="ltr">On Fox News this week, the host Laura Ingraham <a href="https://beta.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/09/11/some-thought-benjamin-watson-dunked-laura-ingraham-hes-just-happy-reach-her-viewers/">described my proposal</a> as “resegregating the country.” It isn’t; black athletes are free to go anywhere they like, and nonblack students have always been allowed to attend HBCUs, too. Regardless, instead of <a href="https://video.foxnews.com/v/6085344689001/#sp=show-clips">mislabeling my argument</a>, conservatives should have been applauding it.</p><p dir="ltr">For years, commentators on the right have lectured black people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. (Let’s put aside, for the moment, everything that’s wrong with that argument, which presumes that individual achievement can successfully overcome centuries of institutionally racist policies.) I am encouraging black people to use their athletic talents for the good of their own community. College football and basketball have become billion-dollar empires. College coaches and administrators make millions in salary because of the lucrative television and merchandise deals that marquee black talent has helped them secure. These same athletes could help rebuild, revitalize, and strengthen HBCUs, which were black athletes’ only option during segregation, but which have since struggled financially and academically.</p><p dir="ltr">Times have changed, but the HBCUs play an outsize role in cultivating future black professionals and community leaders. Despite constituting only 3 percent of four-year colleges in the country, HBCUs have, for instance, produced 80 percent of the nation’s black judges and 50 percent of its black doctors. Even President Donald Trump, whom <a href="https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/454574-trump-approval-rating-drops-among-minorities-after-go-back">very few black Americans</a> view as an ally, understands that these schools deserve federal support. “This nation owes a profound debt of gratitude to its HBCUs,” <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-2019-national-historically-black-colleges-universities-week-conference/">he told more than 40 leaders from such schools</a> at a conference this week.</p><p dir="ltr">And if top college prospects were to attend HBCUs, then the benefits would ripple outward through the black community at large.</p><p dir="ltr">You might think this message would resonate with conservatives. Self-reliance rather than increased government dependency? Using capitalism and market forces to improve your community’s lot in life? These strategies are part of the conservative Ten Commandments. But the notion that black athletes would use their own talents to build up historically black institutions rather than make money for majority-white ones is, for some reason, unthinkable.</p><p dir="ltr">In fact, the accumulation of black wealth and talent has always been feared—sometimes leading to tragic results for African Americans. Historians believe the the <a href="https://beta.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/09/28/feature/they-was-killing-black-people/">Tulsa massacre in 1921</a> was born out of white racial resentment toward affluent African Americans, who used their oil wealth to turn Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood into a thriving enclave known as “Black Wall Street.” Those resentments exploded into violence after it was rumored that a black teenager had sexually assaulted a 17-year-old white female elevator operator. Angry whites destroyed Greenwood during the 18-hour race riot, which resulted in 300 black people dead, and 10,000 people left homeless.</p><p dir="ltr">The United States kept black people from building wealth in other ways. When the GI Bill was created in 1944, <a href="https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits">some lawmakers feared that it would increase upward mobility for blacks</a>, since the bill promised to provide war veterans with resources such as unemployment benefits, low-interest mortgages, and vocational training. <a href="https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/julyaugust/feature/how-the-gi-bill-became-law-in-spite-some-veterans-groups">Representative John Rankin</a> of Mississippi, the chair of the House Veterans Committee at the time, successfully argued that the bill should be administered by individual states rather than the government. By doing that, Rankin, who also tried to block a provision that provided unemployment benefits to black soldiers, guaranteed that black soldiers would receive inequitable treatment.</p><p dir="ltr">So while white soldiers were using these benefits to buy homes and businesses during the height of the post–World War II housing boom, black soldiers were excluded from fully utilizing these benefits for years. And regardless of what the bill promised them, banks were unlikely to approve loans to black men, and educational opportunities were limited because of segregation and Jim Crow.</p><p dir="ltr">Had those black soldiers been treated fairly, today’s racial wealth gap might be considerably smaller. As many historians and economists have noted, if black soldiers had been able to fully participate in the postwar housing boom, there might have been wealth to pass down to subsequent generations. <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2019/06/18/a-conversation-about-the-racial-wealth-gap-and-how-to-address-it/">According to the latest data</a>, the median average white family in the United States has a net worth of $171,000, while the average African American family has only $17,000.</p><p dir="ltr">The resistance to black empowerment exposes deep-held insecurities and blatant hypocrisy. Ingraham whines on her show that <a href="https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22685107/laura-ingraham-white-nationalism-fox-news-tucker-carlson/">America isn’t white enough</a>, and her fellow Fox News host <a href="https://beta.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/09/10/face-it-tucker-carlson-your-anti-diversity-segment-was-racist/">Tucker Carlson</a> complains that <a href="https://beta.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/09/10/face-it-tucker-carlson-your-anti-diversity-segment-was-racist/">diversity is hurting </a>the country. But <a href="https://video.foxnews.com/v/6083922069001/#sp=show-clips">it’s my essay that’s portrayed as a blow to racial progress</a>! Neither Ingraham nor Carlson has shown much interest in racial advancement or integration before now. But the idea of black athletes banding together is threatening in some circles because it comes at the expense of white control over sports.</p><p dir="ltr">If I deserve criticism for anything, it would be for putting an unfair burden on black athletes—who, you could argue, should not be tasked with pitching in to save black colleges. The fact that black colleges don’t have the resources to attract them to their schools isn’t the athletes’ fault, and it’s the result of years of systemic problems that long predate their birth.</p><p dir="ltr">Still, problems don’t go away unless someone does something to fix them. After King shared with Belafonte his misgivings about the course of integration, Belafonte asked his friend what should be done now that they were inside the “burning house.” King responded that black people should “become the firemen.” He added: “Let us not stand by and let the house burn.”</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/F1-DMYheHFM" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Jemele Hillhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/jemele-hill/?utm_source=feedEric Thayer / ReutersHoward University graduates await the commencement speaker Chadwick Boseman in May 2018.What the Right Doesn’t Understand About Black Colleges2019-09-13T08:30:00-04:002019-09-13T09:18:44-04:00Historically African American institutions serve a vital purpose, and it’s not segregationist to urge black athletes to attend them.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/republicans-dont-get-historically-black-colleges/597973/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597928<p dir="ltr">In 2017, Holly Becker took an AncestryDNA test, and the results, she would only later learn, exactly matched those of a young man in New York. This was strange, but the test was not wrong. She really did <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-life-cord-blood-donor-recipient-meet-20190905-5g2rrnbrznbsbf2hzakivmtoxm-story.html">have his DNA inside her</a>. Two decades ago, she had undergone an umbilical-cord-blood transplant to treat her non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The anonymous donor’s cells became her cells, and they still course through her body today. <em>That</em> is what the AncestryDNA test had picked up.</p><p dir="ltr">This Sunday, Becker, now 45, <a href="https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/09/08/woman-meets-man-whose-umbilical-cord-blood-saved-her-life-after-they-find-each-other-through-dna-test/">met her donor</a>, Patrick Davey, 25, for the first time, in Chicago. They laughed. They embraced. They told each other their life stories. Theirs is the first public case of a patient meeting their cord-blood donor. For nearly 30 years, donations from infant umbilical-cord blood have been strictly anonymous for ethical reasons, but mail-in DNA tests have now introduced a way to circumvent the policy—even inadvertently, as in Becker’s case.</p><p dir="ltr">“We just didn’t think technology like this would exist and this scenario would arrive,” says Joanne Kurtzberg, the director of the Carolinas Cord Blood Bank and a pioneer in cord-blood banking. But now it has, and Kurtzberg said it was sure to come up at a cord-blood meeting she happens to be organizing in Miami this weekend.</p><p dir="ltr">Becker and Davey’s connection began 25 years ago, shortly after he was born. His mom agreed to donate his umbilical-cord blood, and for several years his cells lay frozen in a cord-blood bank in New York. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away in Chicago, a 24-year-old Becker started getting fevers and night sweats and extreme fatigue—symptoms, it turned out, of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that affects white blood cells. She went through multiple rounds of chemo. They all failed. “I was literally at the point where I was about to die,” she says. That’s when her doctor suggested a then-novel transplant involving cord blood from a stranger.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/dna-test-divorce/571684/?utm_source=feed">Read: When a DNA test reveals your daughter is not your biological child</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Umbilical cords are rich in hematopoietic stem cells, which ultimately give rise to all different types of blood cells. To do the transplant, doctors would destroy Becker’s own cancerous cells before infusing her with hematopoietic stem cells from a healthy matched donor. Those cells would eventually divide to replace all the blood in her. It was a grueling procedure, and Becker did not fully recover for two years. But she has stayed healthy ever since, and she has always wondered over the years about the anonymous donor who saved her life. Her doctor told her the donor was untraceable. That’s how it’s supposed to work.</p><figure class="left"><img alt="" height="870" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/Davey_Patrick_at_2_months_and_Dania/8c7615420.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="caption">Dania Davey with a two-month-old Patrick (Courtesy of Dania Davey)</figcaption></figure><p dir="ltr">And when Becker finally spit into a tube for her AncestryDNA test, she was not trying to find her donor; she did not even know that was possible. She was just interested in her family history. But the test matched her to Patrick’s mom, Dania Davey, who immediately messaged Becker when she saw a new and very close match—so close as to be mother or daughter. Davey, who is adopted, had recently found her birth family through AncestryDNA, and this new match made no sense. She knew her birth mother. She certainly knew Becker was not her daughter. They both thought the test was wrong.</p><p dir="ltr">But Becker wondered about the transplant. She asked Davey whether she was from New York—because that was the only fact she knew about her cord-blood donor. Davey said yes. When Becker shared her hypothesis with her oncologist at Loyola Medicine, Patrick Stiff, he was initially skeptical. Transplants with hematopoietic stem cells—which can come from cord blood, as in Becker’s case, or from bone marrow—should only alter the blood cells in her body. The rest of her would still be her. Why would DNA in Becker’s saliva match her donor’s? (On the other hand, blood transfusions do not involve killing off the recipient’s blood cells and have only tiny, transient effects on the recipient’s DNA.)</p><p dir="ltr">Then, Stiff told me, he heard from yet another transplant patient, who spit into an AncestryDNA tube and got strange results. The DNA in saliva, it turns out, can come from cells in the cheek lining (which should have the recipient’s DNA) and from white blood cells (which should have the donor’s DNA) that guard against bacteria in the mouth. <a href="https://www.ancestry.com/lp/bone-marrow-stem-cell-transplant-dna-test">AncestryDNA</a> and <a href="https://customercare.23andme.com/hc/en-us/articles/202907990-I-received-a-bone-marrow-transplant-can-I-use-the-23andMe-Personal-Genetic-Service-">23andMe</a> actually advise customers who have had bone-marrow or cord-blood transplants against taking their tests, as the mix of genetic material can cause them to fail. Often enough, though, the tests return the genetic results of the donor. Many bone-marrow recipients have gotten their donors’ DNA results, and Stiff said he knew of at least one other unpublicized case of a cord-blood recipient who found their donor.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/fertility-doctor-donald-cline-secret-children/583249/?utm_source=feed">Read: The fertility doctor’s secret children</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">To confirm what everyone now suspected, Patrick Davey took a DNA test. He did, in fact, match the original records for Becker’s anonymous donor. So for all these years, the two strangers had had this unusual bond: To receive cord blood is to carry forever someone else’s DNA inside you. To donate cord blood is to possibly have someone out there—unbeknownst to you even—walking around with your DNA inside them. Davey says his friends joked that he could be pinned for a crime, and he laughed at the absurdity of the idea. He and Becker have vowed to keep in touch. “She’s like family now,” he says.</p><p dir="ltr">As far-fetched as that may sound, something like it has happened before. In 2005, forensic scientists reported on a <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4378044.stm">case in Alaska</a> where DNA evidence from a sexual assault pointed to a man who was in jail at the time of the crime. The evidence turned out to have come from his brother, who had given the incarcerated man a bone-marrow transplant years earlier.</p><p dir="ltr">Adult bone-marrow and infant cord-blood donations differ in one important way, though. An infant is rarely aware that the cord blood was donated. Patrick didn’t know until the whole business with the DNA test came up. He wasn’t the one who consented to the donation, after all, as he had just been born. His mom did.</p><p dir="ltr">This is what gave pause to Brianne Kirkpatrick, a genetic counselor who has written about <a href="https://www.watersheddna.com/blog-and-news/stemcelltransplantgedmatch">DNA tests and bone-marrow transplants</a>. “It was a great story, a really happy outcome for the woman. Her life was saved,” she says. “It’s more the implications of what that means on a grander societal level.” Consumer DNA tests have been used to uncover family secrets and track down criminals; those investigations <a href="https://www.watersheddna.com/blog-and-news/umbilical-cord-donation">can go very wrong</a> if test results are misinterpreted because some people don’t realize their cord blood was donated.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/blood-from-human-umbilical-cords-can-rejuvenate-old-mouse-brains/523509/?utm_source=feed">Read: Blood from human umbilical cords can rejuvenate old mouse brains</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">The cord-blood community is taking seriously the implications of donor and recipient contact too. Kurtzberg says banks had established <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/392623">a policy of strict anonymity</a> in part because of the fear that sick recipients might try to contact donors to get more cells. (Blood from a single umbilical cord may not contain enough cells for an adult. Moreover, siblings of the donor may match the recipient as well.) Nobody wanted a scenario of a dying patient begging a parent to let them take bone marrow from a young child.</p><p dir="ltr">This wall has stayed in place, even as the first infants whose cord blood was donated have become adults. Donna Regan, the director of customer-ready products for <a href="https://bethematch.org/">Be the Match</a>—the nonprofit that operates the registry for cord-blood donations—says her organization recently reviewed the policy about letting recipients contact now-adult donors. The group decided against it—because the mothers had been promised anonymity when they consented all those years ago. “We’ve been very rigid in protecting the confidentiality and identity of cord-blood donors,” says Regan, and she doesn’t expect that policy to change. For new cord-blood donors in the future, Kurtzberg says she thinks banks will have to change what they say about anonymity when asking for informed consent. But that overhaul will be slow.</p><p dir="ltr">Sperm banks are currently <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2019/09/11/consumer-dna-tests-sperm-donor-anonymity/">dealing with a similar fallout</a>, as donor-conceived people are finding their sometimes reluctant donors through DNA tests. Anonymity has allowed tissue banking to sidestep some of the messy questions about life and death. Anonymity will not do so any longer.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/jNZEoVwEx20" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Sarah Zhanghttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/sarah-zhang/?utm_source=feedCourtesy of Holly Becker / The AtlanticHolly Becker today (left) and in her 20s (right), when she had cancerA Woman’s AncestryDNA Test Revealed a Medical Secret2019-09-13T07:00:00-04:002019-09-13T13:23:52-04:00As a cancer patient, she had received cord-blood cells from an anonymous donor. The DNA from those cells led her to him.https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/woman-cord-blood-donor-dna-test/597928/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597733<p>A few years ago, a strange phenomenon began to appear in polls that asked Americans for their opinions about higher education: People’s responses suddenly started to diverge along partisan lines. Democrats have continued to describe higher education as a mostly positive force in American life, but Republicans’ opinions of college, beginning around 2015, took a sharp turn toward the negative.</p><p>This shift didn’t come out of nowhere. Conservative politicians and media figures have in recent years been making a sustained and often vociferous public case against higher education. Instead of college, their argument often goes, young Americans should pursue a career in the skilled trades. And there is one trade that gets held up more than any other as an example of the opportunities awaiting those who shun college: welding.</p><p>If you trace back the history of this idea, you eventually get to a kind of welding ur-text: an April 2014 op-ed column in <em>The</em> <em>Wall Street Journal</em> by Josh Mandel, then the Republican treasurer of Ohio, titled “Welders Make $150,000? Bring Back Shop Class.” Its premise was that in rural Ohio, there was such a shortage of skilled tradespeople that employers were regularly hiring welders at salaries of $150,000 a year and up. Mandel contrasted the bountiful opportunities available to blue-collar workers without college degrees with the dismal prospects he said many college graduates faced: “Too many young people have four-year liberal-arts degrees, are thousands of dollars in debt and find themselves serving coffee at Starbucks or working part-time at the mall.”</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/08/republicans-conservatives-college/596497/?utm_source=feed">Read: </a>]</i><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/08/republicans-conservatives-college/596497/?utm_source=feed">Republicans changed their mind about higher education really quickly</a></p><p>Mandel’s notion of economic salvation through welding spread quickly, from op-ed pages to cable-news segments to political speeches. In a 2015 Republican presidential debate, Senator Marco Rubio declared, “For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” President Donald Trump invited a welder from Dayton to be one of the guests of honor at his first State of the Union address, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has visited welding classes across the country, from a suburb of Fort Worth to Far Rockaway, Queens. Paul Ryan extolled the virtues of a welding career at a summit meeting sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. Even Ivanka Trump pulled on a welding mask for the cameras and tried her hand with a torch.</p><p align="center">***</p><p>In November 2016, a few days after Donald Trump’s victory, I traveled to Taylorsville, North Carolina, a small town in the Appalachian foothills. Taylorsville is remote and sparsely populated; to get to a Starbucks or a movie theater—or just a town with more than 5,000 people—it’s at least a half-hour drive. Almost everyone in town is white, and only about one in seven adults has a bachelor’s degree. In the 2016 presidential election, three-quarters of the county voted Republican.</p><p>I had come to Taylorsville to try to understand more deeply the relationship between higher education, opportunity, and welding, and I spent a couple of evenings in the home of a young welding student in his mid-twenties named Orry Carriere, drinking coffee and talking. His journey through adolescence and high school had been rocky, he told me. Orry’s father had left before he was born, and the absence of a stable male role model in his life had led him into some wild and self-destructive behavior, especially in his early teens. He made it through high school, but only barely, graduating 388th in a class of 389.</p><p>After high school, Orry went to work. He spent a year installing locks for a local company, and then another year doing oil changes at the Taylorsville Snappy Lube. Those jobs paid minimum wage or a little more, and the work wasn’t steady or predictable. At 21, Orry got married, and he and his wife moved into a rented trailer. His stepfather helped him get his next job, drawing wire at a factory. It was hard work, loud and dirty and repetitive, but it paid $13.90 an hour, more than Snappy Lube. After a year and a half, Orry was fired for missing too many days of work, but he soon managed to land a job at another steel-wire factory. Then he got fired from that job as well.</p><p>It was by that point the spring of 2016, and Orry was 24, separated, and unemployed. He was raising two children with his ex-wife, Katie, and he was living with a new girlfriend named Crystal. Orry had been working hard for five years, and yet he was broke, with nothing saved. At every job he’d had, he told me, he’d been made to feel as though he was disposable, like he didn’t really matter.</p><p>Crystal was also unemployed that spring, and she suggested they both think about going back to school. At first, college seemed like the last thing Orry might want to consider. But Crystal showed Orry the website for Catawba Valley Community College in nearby Hickory, and he saw that the school offered an associate’s degree in welding. He had done a little welding in high school and liked it, and that made the notion of college a lot easier to imagine. “It dawned on me that by firing me, they had given me an opportunity,” Orry told me, talking about his former employer. “I could go to college to better myself, and I could find a different job, something that was away from all this.”</p><p>When I met Orry on that November night in Taylorsville, he was just a couple of months into his first semester at CVCC. To his surprise, he had come to see college as his route to a better life, not just for himself but for his young family. “I want my kids to have stuff I didn’t have growing up,” he told me. “I don’t want them to have to wonder where their next meal is coming from. I want them to have the chances I never had.”</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>One of the many odd things about the rhetoric that posits welding as the antithesis of college is that in order to become a welder, you actually have to go to college. You can learn the basics in a high-school shop class, as Orry did, but to do it well, you not only have to master multiple precise manual skills; you also need a pretty deep scientific understanding of the metal you’re working with and the electrical and chemical processes you’re using to manipulate that metal. To earn an associate’s degree, Orry would need to pass 12 separate welding courses, plus basic courses in math and English, as well as more conceptual courses in welding metallurgy.</p><p>His first year at CVCC went well, mostly. It wasn’t completely smooth—he failed his required English course, which was offered only online. But in his welding classes, he earned nothing but A’s and B’s. After that first year ended, he ran into some bureaucratic trouble with his financial aid, he told me, and he took both the summer and the fall of 2017 off from school. For a while, I wondered whether he might just be finished with college. But then he started up again as a full-time student in January 2018.</p><p>When I visited him that winter, Orry said he was glad to be back in school, but otherwise, life was not going well. He and Crystal were broke. They had been evicted from their house, and their car was stolen. There was a moment that semester, Orry told me, when he wanted to give up on school, leave his family behind, and start over in a new town. But he kept thinking of his children and the example he was setting for them, and he decided to get back to class, even if he had to take the bus many miles to get there.</p><p>Still, at the end of that semester, Orry remained 16 credits shy of the 65 he needed to complete his associate’s degree, and those included his required English and math classes, which he wasn’t confident he could pass. Part of him wanted to go right back to school in the fall and finish his degree, but he wasn’t sure how to pull it off. He and Crystal had broken up, and he was back together with his ex-wife, Katie; Orry and Katie and their two kids had moved in with Orry’s mother.</p><p>That summer, he found a job in Wilkesboro, working in a factory that manufactured doors. It was a good position, but the work was hot and exhausting and his schedule was brutal: 12-hour night shifts for seven days straight, from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., followed by seven straight days off. He knew there was no way he could manage school with that schedule. He was earning $16.75 an hour, which was a decent wage, but it was only a couple of dollars an hour more than he had been making before he started college. And he now had $19,000 in student loans that he would soon have to start paying back.</p><p>Orry was no longer feeling all that optimistic about the welding profession. Despite the sunny claims of <em>The</em> <em>Wall Street Journal</em> and Marco Rubio, the real-life welding jobs that Orry was able to find in western North Carolina were paying experienced welders between $12 and $15 an hour, which was less than he was making at the door factory. Orry knew that better-paying welding jobs existed, but they were far away and short-term and physically arduous, and if he went out and chased one, he’d have to leave his kids behind. Now that he was back together with Katie and they had what felt like a genuine family, he wanted to stay close to home and be a real father. Besides, even those well-paying welding jobs didn’t pay <em>that</em> well—maybe $30 or $40 an hour, if he got lucky.</p><p>This is the other glaring flaw at the heart of the case for welding as the ideal alternative to college. The overwhelming majority of American welders are not earning $150,000 a year. Not even close. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual salary for an experienced welder in 2018 was a little more than $41,000 a year—which was only about $16,000 above the poverty line for a family of four.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/choosing-trade-school-over-college/584275/?utm_source=feed">Read: The stigma of choosing trade school over college</a>]</i></p><p>The good thing about welding as a profession is that it has a relatively high salary floor. You’re almost always going to make more than minimum wage, even starting out. But the downside, economically, is that welding has a pretty low salary ceiling. Welders at the 90th percentile of income for the profession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, earn $63,000 a year before taxes. Those are, statistically, the top earners, and they are usually expert welders with decades of experience. The salaries that make headlines in <em>The</em> <em>Wall Street Journal</em> are somewhere between rare and apocryphal.</p><p>Which leads to an intriguing question: Given the sobering reality that those unbiased statistics convey, why has the wealthy-welder myth become so widely accepted, at least in certain circles? Why does Marco Rubio believe—or claim to believe—that welders make more than philosophers?</p><p align="center">* * *</p><p>Let me suggest three possible reasons.</p><p>The first and most obvious one is that the people making the political speeches and writing the newspaper columns and taking part in the cable-news segments don’t know any actual welders. When you watch a talk-show conversation about the folly of the four-year college degree, you can be reasonably confident that everyone on camera has a four-year college degree. So that is potential reason No. 1: simple ignorance.</p><p>The second possible reason is wishful thinking, topped with a dollop of nostalgia. Money aside, welding is an impressive and admirable pursuit. It is a burly, physical job, but there is delicate artistry in it as well, fine craftsmanship with a creative spirit. And an economy in which a manual laborer could reliably earn enough money to support a middle-class family—which is to say, an economy like the United States had not too long ago—would indeed be more equitable, more socially stable, and more family-friendly than the actual economy we have today.</p><p>The third possible reason for the ubiquity of the wealthy-welder myth is less benign: If we are able to persuade ourselves that there are plenty of lucrative opportunities available for young people like Orry who didn’t much like high school, it absolves us of our shared responsibility to address the reality of his limited economic prospects. And if you are able to define welding training, in the public mind, as something <em>separate</em> from college, rather than what it actually is—a college major like any other—it provides a way to distract public attention from policy shifts that have made it more difficult for young people like Orry to reach the middle class. Over the past decade, as the make-believe story of the rich welder has grown and spread, public spending on the community colleges where actual young people are trying to learn actual welding has shrunk—in some states, quite drastically so.</p><p>In North Carolina, the amount the state government spends on each community-college student declined, after adjusting for inflation, from $5,830 per student in 2007 to $4,891 per student in 2016, the year that Orry enrolled at CVCC. That’s a cut of about 16 percent, and it took place during a period when state tax revenues in North Carolina actually went up. The state has the money, in other words, but state legislators are choosing not to spend it on institutions like Catawba Valley Community College.</p><p>What happened in North Carolina mirrors what happened in most other states: When the recession hit in 2008, tax revenues dropped sharply, and state governments cut their spending on higher education. Then the recovery arrived, and tax revenues went back up—but most state governments didn’t replace the funding they had cut from the budgets of community colleges and other public colleges.</p><p>Those budget cuts in North Carolina had a direct impact on Orry’s experience at CVCC. First, they added to his tuition costs, and thus to his debt: When adjusted for inflation, community-college tuition in North Carolina has increased by 49 percent since 2007.</p><p>But more important: The new revenue from North Carolina’s community-college students has not been enough to compensate for the cuts in state spending, which means colleges like CVCC have had to cut budgets and cut corners. That is why the English class that Orry needs to pass in order to get his degree is offered only online: because it’s cheaper that way.</p><p>There is no doubt that Orry would benefit from high-quality face-to-face instruction from a caring and conscientious English professor. But he is almost certainly not going to get it. And that is going to make it much harder for him to pass, and thus to graduate. Orry says he is still determined to finish his associate’s degree, but if he doesn’t manage to do so, he won’t be alone. Right now, only 26 percent of students at CVCC are able to complete a two-year degree in three years.</p><hr><p><small><em>This article has been adapted from Paul Tough’s book, </em><a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780544944480">The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us. </a></small></p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/qZdfrI-12Vw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Paul Toughhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/paul-tough/?utm_source=feedThomasLENNE / Shutterstock / The AtlanticWelding Won’t Make You Rich2019-09-13T07:00:00-04:002019-09-13T10:01:54-04:00Is a lucrative college-free job too good to be true?https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/welding-doesnt-pay-as-well-as-republicans-think/597733/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597955<p dir="ltr">It might be the most ironclad law of politics in 2019. Democrats win cities—period.</p><p dir="ltr">They win in big cities, like New York, and small cities, like Ames, Iowa; in old cities, like Boston, and new cities, like Las Vegas. They win in midwestern manufacturing cores and coastal tech hubs, in dense cities connected by subway and in sprawling metros held together by car and tar. If you Google-image-search a map of county-by-county U.S. election results, what you will see is a red nation dotted with archipelagos of urban blue.</p><p dir="ltr">This fact may not seem worthy of inquiry, since the Democratic Party is the nation’s more progressive party, and—dating back to the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages—populous and diverse places have typically been more open to new ideas in science and politics. One hundred years ago, however, Democrats represented a wildly different constituency of rural white southerners and populist western farmers. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson’s support in America’s rural counties was, if anything, slightly higher than his support in urban counties.</p><figure><img alt="" height="550" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/Democratic_vote_share/6e55217af.png" width="596"><figcaption class="caption">Source: <em>Why Cities Lose</em>, Jonathan Rodden</figcaption></figure><p>So how did Democrats and density become synonymous?</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/americas-three-biggest-metros-shrinking/597544/?utm_source=feed">Derek Thompson: Why are America’s three biggest metros shrinking?</a>]</i></p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">According to Jonathan Rodden, a Stanford political-science professor and the author of the new book <em>Why Cities Lose</em>, the Democrats’ transformation into an urban party was not a smooth process so much as the result of several inflection points in the past 150 years.</p><p dir="ltr">The story begins in the late 19th century, in the filthy, sweaty maw of the Industrial Revolution. To reduce transportation costs, industrialists had built factories in cities with easy access to ports. These factories attracted workers by the thousands, who piled into nearby tenements. Their work was backbreaking—and so were <a href="http://oer2go.org/mods/en-boundless/www.boundless.com/u-s-history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history-textbook/the-gilded-age-1870-1900-20/the-rise-of-the-city-145/tenements-and-overcrowding-767-9587/index.html">their often-collapsing apartment buildings</a>. When urban workers revolted against their exploitative and dangerous working conditions, they formed the beginning of an international labor movement that would eventually make cities the epicenter of leftist politics.</p><p dir="ltr">While workers’ parties won seats in parliamentary European countries with proportional representation, they struggled to gain power in the U.S. Why didn’t socialism take off in America? It’s the question that launched a thousand political-economy papers. One answer is that the U.S. political system is dominated by two parties competing in winner-take-all districts, making it almost impossible for third parties to break through at the national level. To gain power, the U.S. labor movement had to find a home in one of those parties.</p><p dir="ltr">This set up the first major inflection point. America’s socialists found welcoming accommodations in the political machines that sprouted up in the largest manufacturing hubs, such as Chicago, Boston, and New York. Not all of the “bosses” at the helm of these machines were Democrats; Philadelphia and Chicago were intermittently controlled by Republicans. But the nation’s most famous machine, New York’s Tammany Hall, was solidly Democratic. As that city’s urban manufacturing workforce exploded in the early 20th century, Tammany Hall bosses had little choice but to forge an alliance with the workers’ parties.</p><p dir="ltr">That led to a second inflection point, in the person of Al Smith. Manhattan-born, Irish Catholic, and a four-term governor of New York, Smith identified with immigrants and urban workers. When he won the 1928 Democratic presidential nomination, he arguably became the first urban national candidate, and won the support of blue-collar Catholic voters in cities across the country. Although he lost the election to Herbert Hoover, Smith’s candidacy marked a watershed in American history, as Rodden writes:</p><blockquote>
<p dir="ltr">What started as an idiosyncratic local connection between urbanization and Democratic voting in New York quickly spread to the rest of the industrialized states in 1928 … [Smith’s platform] was not quite the agenda of the Socialists, but it was the beginning of the Democrats’ transformation into a party of the urban working class.</p>
</blockquote><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/?utm_source=feed">Derek Thompson: The future of the city is childless</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Smith’s successor as New York governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had better political fortunes: He won a landslide presidential victory in 1932 after the economy crashed, and his New Deal incorporated several elements of the socialist agenda, including Social Security and unemployment insurance. But FDR’s victory did little to solidify Democrats’ standing in the city. Passing the New Deal required the cooperation of politicians representing the distressed rural South. An alliance between the interests of the white manufacturing working class and southern segregationists lasted for decades.</p><p dir="ltr">Miles away from New Deal negotiations in Washington, however, millions of black Americans were forcing the third inflection point as they moved from the rural South to cities, especially in the North and Midwest. During the Great Migration, from 1900 to 1960, the black percentage of the populations in South Carolina and Florida declined by more than 20 percent. In that same time period, the African American share of Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago rose from less than 2 percent in each city to more than 20 percent of the population.</p><p dir="ltr">Black voters pushed urban Democrats in these northern cities to protect their labor and voting interests.</p><p dir="ltr">By the early 1960s, the Democratic Party was an unstable coalition, balancing the support of black urban workers with that of southern segregationists from whom they had fled. With the Civil Rights Act, signed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Democrats effectively renounced their southern flank. Out of 20 southern Democratic senators, just one—Ralph Yarborough, of Texas—voted in favor of the bill. In 1968, Democrats won less than 10 percent of the once-dependable white southern vote while sweeping the urban manufacturing cores of the Northeast and the Midwest, from Worcester to Wichita.</p><p dir="ltr">Only in the past 20 years have dense counties in the South become reliably Democratic, Rodden writes. Since the 1990s, southern cities have become more similar to their northern kin, boasting a similar mix of large companies and <a href="https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/08/education-talent-city-ranking-college-degree-us/596509/">explosive growth</a> in college-educated adults. What’s more, the Great Migration has started to reverse itself. In the past few decades, with the deindustrialization of northern manufacturing towns, millions of black families have returned to metros in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, bringing their politics with them. Black families on the move have twice pushed Democrats toward becoming a party of the city—first in the North, and then in the South. </p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/red-state-blue-city/513857/?utm_source=feed">Read: Red state, blue city</a>]</i></p><p class="dropcap" dir="ltr">There is no obvious reason why a 19th-century movement led by Irish Catholic noneducated factory workers should become a 21st-century party for college grads, nonwhite voters, and software developers that defends gay rights, women’s rights, and legalized abortion. But it makes sense if you understand the Democratic Party through the lens of the modern city. Starting in the 1970s through today, Democrats and Republicans have been compelled to take sides on issues that hadn’t previously been politicized. And they have routinely sorted themselves along urban-rural lines, creating a pattern where there was once merely a tendency.</p><p dir="ltr">Take the issue of abortion, for example. Party identification didn’t use to work as a proxy for one’s opinion on reproductive rights. (In private conversations, the Republican President Richard Nixon even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/politics/24nixon.html">said</a>, “There are times when an abortion is necessary.”) When the issue became part of the culture war after <em>Roe v. Wade</em>, however, Democrats embraced the viewpoint of <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3511262?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">the more secular city</a> and consolidated their pro-choice position. So too, they sided against prayer in school and laws protecting “traditional” male-female marriage. Meanwhile, Republicans in the past 40 years have used socially conservative stances to strengthen their position with their more religious rural base.</p><p dir="ltr">City demographics, if not quite city values, also explain how Democrats went from the party of hardware to the party of software. As low-skill factory work has moved out of the urban core, blue-collar urban workers have been replaced in city centers with immigrants and college graduates working in finance, tech, marketing, and media. This has made Democrats “advocates for the nascent globalized knowledge-economy sector,” Rodden writes. As recently as 1996, there was no relationship between a county’s likelihood to produce patents and its Democratic voting share. Today, Democrats win overwhelmingly in counties with the largest number of patents per 1,000 people, such as San Jose and Seattle.</p><figure><img alt="" height="335" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/unnamed/fbb37b977.png" width="512"><figcaption class="caption">Source: <em>Why Cities Lose,</em> Jonathan Rodden</figcaption></figure><p>With America’s biggest metros drawing millions of young educated workers, the urban-rural divide has also become a diploma divide. Throughout the 1980s, college graduates were as likely to vote for one party as the other. But by 2016, Democrats had become the party of nerds. Meanwhile, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination while proclaiming in the midst of the primary, “I love the poorly educated!”</p><figure><img alt="" height="281" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/09/unnamed_1/232d4dc3b.png" width="512"><figcaption class="caption">Source: <em>Why Cities Lose</em>, Jonathan Rodden</figcaption></figure><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/americas-hot-new-job-being-rich-persons-servant/595774/?utm_source=feed">Derek Thompson: The new servant class</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Psychological factors reinforce the phenomenon of the liberal Democratic city. In his 2008 book, <em>The Big Sort</em>, Bill Bishop argued that Americans were self-segregating by neighborhood, creating balkanized urban areas of kale-munching libs who find Cracker Barrel America culturally incomprehensible. Evidence for Bishop’s thesis is uneven, but there might something to the idea that blue cities get bluer due to sorting effects. As the writer and researcher Will Wilkinson argues, cities are magnets for individuals who score highly on “openness”—the Big Five personality trait that comprises curiosity, love of diversity, and open-mindedness. He points to <a href="https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/old_uploads/2019/06/Wilkinson-Density-Divide-Final.pdf">research</a> showing remarkable concentration of self-described “open” personalities in urban centers around the world, such as London.</p><p dir="ltr">It’s also conceivable that living in a city might naturally promote ideologies that correspond with the modern Democratic Party. The modern city brings its residents into constant interaction with the fact of, and necessity for, state intervention. Urban residents trade cars for public transit, live in neighborhoods with local trash codes, and deal with planning commissions about shadows, ocean views, and parking rights. City residents are natural “externality pessimists,” to use Steve Randy Waldman’s <a href="https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7230.html">clever phrase</a>, who are exquisitely sensitive to the consequences of individual behavior in a dense place where one man’s action is another man’s nuisance. As a result, residents of dense cities tend to reject libertarianism as unacceptable chaos and instead agitate for wiser governance related to health care, housing policy, and climate change.</p><p dir="ltr">The near future of migration will put some of these theories to the test. In the past few years, young adults have been leaving the richest, densest metropolitan areas and moving south and west—to the suburbs of Austin, and Raleigh, and Vegas, and Phoenix. They’re not looking to start a political movement. They’re just looking for affordable houses, good schools, and good jobs. Their urban exodus is moving them into Republican regions, blurring the clean divide between the deep-blue city and the ruby-red countryside.</p><p dir="ltr">This is the epilogue of our 150-year saga. What happens when the liberal city distributes itself throughout the suburbs of the South and the West? If the blue city of the Northeast changed American politics, will the blue suburb of the Southwest do the same?</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/jmOxCT8V3Ds" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Derek Thompsonhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/derek-thompson/?utm_source=feedGary Hershorn / GettyHow Democrats Conquered the City2019-09-13T06:00:00-04:002019-09-13T13:22:39-04:00Why did a once-rural party became synonymous with density?https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/brief-history-how-democrats-conquered-city/597955/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:39-596668<h3>1.</h3><p><span class="smallcaps">To be a </span><span class="caps"><span class="smallcaps">parent is to be compromised.</span> </span>You pledge allegiance to justice for all, you swear that private attachments can rhyme with the public good, but when the choice comes down to your child or an abstraction—even the well-being of children you don’t know—you’ll betray your principles to the fierce unfairness of love. Then life takes revenge on the conceit that your child’s fate lies in your hands at all. The organized pathologies of adults, including yours—sometimes known as politics—find a way to infect the world of children. Only they can save themselves.</p><p style="background-color: #333; color: #fff; padding: 12px 24px;"><iframe frameborder="no" height="20" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/676814130%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-dqhVY%0D%0A&amp;inverse=true&amp;auto_play=false&amp;show_user=true" style="background-color: #333" width="100%"></iframe><i class="audm--download-cta">To hear more feature stories, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/audio-articles/?utm_source=feed" style="color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;">see our full list</a> or <a href="https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=soundcloud&amp;utm_medium=embed&amp;utm_campaign=atlantic&amp;utm_content=culture_war_kids" style="color: #fff; text-decoration: underline;">get the Audm iPhone app.</a> </i></p><p>Our son underwent his first school interview soon after turning 2. He’d been using words for about a year. An admissions officer at a private school with brand-new, beautifully and sustainably constructed art and dance studios gave him a piece of paper and crayons. While she questioned my wife and me about our work, our son drew a yellow circle over a green squiggle.</p><p>Rather coolly, the admissions officer asked him what it was. “The moon,” he said. He had picked this moment to render his very first representational drawing, and our hopes rose. But her jaw was locked in an icy and inscrutable smile.</p><p>Later, at a crowded open house for prospective families, a hedge-fund manager from a former Soviet republic told me about a good public school in the area that accepted a high percentage of children with disabilities. As insurance against private school, he was planning to grab a spot at this public school by gaming the special-needs system—which, he added, wasn’t hard to do.</p><p>Wanting to distance myself from this scheme, I waved my hand at the roomful of parents desperate to cough up $30,000 for preschool and said, “It’s all a scam.” I meant the whole business of basing admissions on interviews with 2-year-olds. The hedge-fund manager pointed out that if he reported my words to the admissions officer, he’d have one less competitor to worry about.</p><p>When the rejection letter arrived, I took it hard as a comment on our son, until my wife informed me that the woman with the frozen smile had actually been interviewing <i>us</i>. We were the ones who’d been rejected. We consoled ourselves that the school wasn’t right for our family, or we for it. It was a school for amoral finance people.</p><p>At a second private school, my wife watched intently with other parents behind a one-way mirror as our son engaged in group play with other toddlers, their lives secured or ruined by every share or shove. He was put on the wait list.</p><p>The system that dominates our waking hours, commands our unthinking devotion, and drives us, like orthodox followers of an exacting faith, to extraordinary, even absurd feats of exertion is not democracy, which often seems remote and fragile. It’s meritocracy—the system that claims to reward talent and effort with a top-notch education and a well-paid profession, its code of rigorous practice and generous blessings passed down from generation to generation. The pressure of meritocracy made us apply to private schools when our son was 2—not because we wanted him to attend private preschool, but because, in New York City, where we live, getting him into a good public kindergarten later on would be even harder, and if we failed, by that point most of the private-school slots would be filled. As friends who’d started months earlier warned us, we were already behind the curve by the time he drew his picture of the moon. We were maximizing options—hedging, like the finance guy, like many families we knew—already tracing the long line that would lead to the horizon of our son’s future.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="magazine-issue"></aside><p>The <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/whats-the-difference-between-anxiety-and-ambition.html">mood of meritocracy</a> is anxiety—the low-grade panic when you show up a few minutes late and all the seats are taken. New York City, with its dense population, stratified social ladder, and general pushiness, holds a fun-house mirror up to meritocracy. Only New York would force me to wake up early one Saturday morning in February, put on my parka and wool hat, and walk half a mile in the predawn darkness to register our son, then just 17 months old, for nursery school. I arrived to find myself, at best, the 30th person in a line that led from the locked front door of the school up the sidewalk. Registration was still two hours off, and places would be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside.</p><p>I stood waiting in the cold with a strange mix of feelings. I hated the hypercompetitive parents who made everyone’s life more tense. I feared that I’d cheated our son of a slot by not rising until the selfish hour of 5:30. And I worried that we were all bound together in a mad, heroic project that we could neither escape nor understand, driven by supreme devotion to our own child’s future. All for a nursery school called Huggs.</p><p>New York’s distortions let you see the workings of meritocracy in vivid extremes. But the system itself—structured on the belief that, unlike in a collectivized society, individual achievement should be the basis for rewards, and that, unlike in an inherited aristocracy, those rewards must be earned again by each new generation—is all-American. True meritocracy came closest to realization with the rise of standardized tests in the 1950s, the civil-rights movement, and the opening of Ivy League universities to the best and brightest, including women and minorities. A great broadening of opportunity followed. But in recent decades, the system has hardened into a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/?utm_source=feed">From June 2018: The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy</a>]</i></p><p>When parents on the fortunate ledge of this chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them. Far below they see a dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, outsourcing, rising morbidity rates—and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling. They’ll stay married, cook organic family meals, read aloud at bedtime every night, take out a crushing mortgage on a house in a highly rated school district, pay for music teachers and test-prep tutors, and donate repeatedly to overendowed alumni funds. The battle to get their children a place near the front of the line begins before conception and continues well into their kids’ adult lives. At the root of all this is inequality—and inequality produces a host of morbid symptoms, including a frantic scramble for status among members of a professional class whose most prized acquisition is not a Mercedes plug-in hybrid SUV or a family safari to Maasai Mara but an acceptance letter from a university with a top‑10 <i>U.S. News &amp; World Report </i>ranking.</p><p>In his new book, <i>The Meritocracy Trap</i>, the Yale Law professor <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/meritocracys-miserable-winners/594760/?utm_source=feed">Daniel Markovits argues that this system turns elite families into business enterprises</a>, and children into overworked, inauthentic success machines, while producing an economy that favors the super-educated and blights the prospects of the middle class, which sinks toward the languishing poor. Markovits describes the immense investments in money and time that well-off couples make in their children. By kindergarten, the children of elite professionals are already a full two years ahead of middle-class children, and the achievement gap is almost unbridgeable.</p><p>On that freezing sidewalk, I felt a shudder of revulsion at the perversions of meritocracy. And yet there I was, cursing myself for being 30th in line.</p><h3>2.</h3><p><span class="smallcaps">Not long after </span>he drew the picture of the moon, our son was interviewed at another private school, one of the most highly coveted in New York. It was the end of 2009, early in President Barack Obama’s first term, and the teachers were wearing brightly colored <span class="smallcaps">hope</span> pendants that they had crafted with their preschoolers. I suppressed disapproval of the partisan display (what if the face hanging from the teachers’ necks were Sarah Palin’s?) and reassured myself that the school had artistic and progressive values. It recruited the children of writers and other “creatives.” And our son’s monitored group play was successful. He was accepted.</p><p>The school had delicious attributes. Two teachers in each class of 15 children; parents who were concert pianists or playwrights, not just investment bankers; the prospect later on of classes in Latin, poetry writing, puppetry, math theory, taught by passionate scholars. Once in, unless a kid seriously messed up, he faced little chance of ever having to leave, until, 15 years on, the school matched its graduates with top universities where it had close relations with admissions offices. Students wouldn’t have to endure the repeated trauma of applying to middle and high schools that New York forces on public-school children. Our son had a place near the very front of the line, shielded from the meritocracy at its most ruthless. There was only one competition, and he had already prevailed, in monitored group play.</p><p>Two years later we transferred him to a public kindergarten.</p><p>We had just had our second child, a girl. The private school was about to start raising its fee steeply every year into the indefinite future. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/11/when-private-school-tuition-costs-more-than-college/383003/?utm_source=feed">As tuition passed $50,000</a>, the creatives would dwindle and give way to the financials. I calculated that the precollege educations of our two children would cost more than $1.5 million after taxes. This was the practical reason to leave.</p><p>But there was something else—another claim on us. The current phrase for it is <i>social justice</i>. I’d rather use the word <i>democracy</i>, because it conveys the idea of equality and the need for a common life among citizens. No institution has more power to form human beings according to this idea than the public school. That was the original purpose of the “common schools” established by Horace Mann in the mid-19th century: to instill in children the knowledge and morality necessary for the success of republican government, while “embracing children of all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds.”</p><p>The claim of democracy doesn’t negate meritocracy, but they’re in tension. One values equality and openness, the other achievement and security. Neither can answer every need. To lose sight of either makes life poorer. The essential task is to bring meritocracy and democracy into a relation where they can coexist and even flourish.</p><p>My wife and I are products of public schools. Whatever torments they inflicted on our younger selves, we believed in them. We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms that resembled the city where we lived. We didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside our bubble—mostly white, highly and expensively educated—where 4-year-olds who hear 21,000 words a day acquire the unearned confidence of insular advantage and feel, even unconsciously, that they’re better than other people’s kids.</p><p>Public schools are a public good. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/07/richard-carranza-segregation-new-york-city-schools/564299/?utm_source=feed">Our city’s are among the most racially and economically segregated in America</a>. The gaps in proficiency that separate white and Asian from black and Latino students in math and English are immense and growing. Some advocates argue that creating more integrated schools would reduce those gaps. Whether or not the data conclusively prove it, to be half-conscious in America is to know that schools of concentrated poverty are likely to doom the children who attend them. This knowledge is what made our decision both political and fraught.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-war-on-public-schools/537903/?utm_source=feed">From October 2017: Americans have given up on public schools. That’s a mistake.</a>]</i></p><p>Our “zoned” elementary school, two blocks from our house, was forever improving on a terrible reputation, but not fast enough. Friends had pulled their kids out after second or third grade, so when we took the tour we insisted, against the wishes of the school guide, on going upstairs from the kindergarten classrooms and seeing the upper grades, too. Students were wandering around the rooms without focus, the air was heavy with listlessness, there seemed to be little learning going on. Each year the school was becoming a few percentage points less poor and less black as the neighborhood gentrified, but most of the white kids were attending a “gifted and talented” school within the school, where more was expected and more was given. The school was integrating and segregating at the same time.</p><p>One day I was at a local playground with our son when I fell into conversation with an elderly black woman who had lived in the neighborhood a long time and understood all about our school dilemma, which was becoming the only subject that interested me. She scoffed at our “zoned” school—it had been badly run for so long that it would need years to become passable. I mentioned a second school, half a dozen blocks away, that was probably available if we applied. Her expression turned to alarm. “Don’t send him there,” she said. “That’s a <i>failure</i> school. That school will always be a <i>failure</i> school.” It was as if an eternal curse had been laid on it, beyond anyone’s agency or remedy. The school was mostly poor and black. We assumed it would fail our children, because we knew it was failing other children.</p><p>That year, when my son turned 5, attending daytime tours and evening open houses became a second job. We applied to eight or nine public schools. We applied to far-flung schools that we’d heard took a few kids from out of district, only to find that there was a baby boom on and the seats had already been claimed by zoned families. At one new school that had a promising reputation, the orientation talk was clotted with education jargon and the toilets in the boys’ bathroom with shit, but we would have taken a slot if one had been offered.</p><p>Among the schools where we went begging was one a couple of miles from our house that admitted children from several districts. This school was economically and racially mixed by design, with demographics that came close to matching the city’s population: 38 percent white, 29 percent black, 24 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian. That fact alone made the school a rarity in New York. Two-thirds of the students performed at or above grade level on standardized tests, which made the school one of the higher-achieving in the city (though we later learned that there were large gaps, as much as 50 percent, between the results for the wealthier, white students and the poorer, Latino and black students). And the school appeared to be a happy place. Its pedagogical model was progressive—“child centered”—based on learning through experience. Classes seemed loose, but real work was going on. Hallways were covered with well-written compositions. Part of the playground was devoted to a vegetable garden. This combination of diversity, achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard-of in New York public schools. This school squared the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent. We got wait-listed.</p><p>The summer before our son was to enter kindergarten, an administrator to whom I’d written a letter making the case that our family and the school were a perfect match called with the news that our son had gotten in off the wait list. She gave me five minutes to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a half of them.</p><p>I can see now that a strain of selfishness and vanity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cosseted New York of successful professionals. I had no authentic connection—not at work, in friendships, among neighbors—to the shared world of the city’s very different groups that our son was about to enter. I was ready to offer him as an emissary to that world, a token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school bus to an institution whose name began with <i>P.S.</i></p><p>A few parents at the private school reacted as if we’d given away a winning lottery ticket, or even harmed our son—such was the brittle nature of meritocracy. And to be honest, in the coming years, when we heard that sixth graders at the private school were writing papers on <i>The Odyssey</i>, or when we watched our son and his friends sweat through competitive public-middle-school admissions, we wondered whether we’d committed an unforgivable sin and went back over all our reasons for changing schools until we felt better.</p><p>Before long our son took to saying, “I’m a public-school person.” When I asked him once what that meant, he said, “It means I’m not snooty.” He never looked back.</p><figure><img alt="Illustration of a hand holding a pencil" height="724" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/08/PackerOption2_1/59a5c7d93.jpg" width="630"><figcaption class="credit">Paul Spella</figcaption></figure><h3>3.</h3><p><span class="smallcaps">The public school </span>was housed in the lower floors of an old brick building, five stories high and a block long, next to an expressway. A middle and high school occupied the upper floors. The building had the usual grim features of any public institution in New York—steel mesh over the lower windows, a police officer at the check-in desk, scuffed yellow walls, fluorescent lights with toxic PCBs, caged stairwells, ancient boilers and no air conditioners—as if to dampen the expectations of anyone who turned to government for a basic service. The bamboo flooring and state-of-the-art science labs of private schools pandered to the desire for a special refuge from the city. Our son’s new school felt utterly porous to it.</p><p>I had barely encountered an American public school since leaving high school. That was in the late 1970s, in the Bay Area, the same year that the tax revolt began its long evisceration of California’s stellar education system. Back then, nothing was asked of parents except that they pay their taxes and send their children to school, and everyone I knew went to the local public schools. Now the local public schools—at least the one our son was about to attend—couldn’t function without parents. Donations at our school paid the salaries of the science teacher, the Spanish teacher, the substitute teachers. They even paid for furniture. Because many of the families were poor, our PTA had a hard time meeting its annual fundraising goal of $100,000, and some years the principal had to send out a message warning parents that science or art was about to be cut. Not many blocks away, elementary schools zoned for wealthy neighborhoods routinely raised $1 million—these schools were called “private publics.” Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggled to bring in $30,000. This enormous gap was just one way inequality pursued us into the public-school system.</p><p>We threw ourselves into the adventure of the new school. We sent in class snacks when it was our week, I chaperoned a field trip to study pigeons in a local park, and my wife cooked chili for an autumn fundraiser. The school’s sense of mission extended to a much larger community, and so there was an appeal for money when a fire drove a family from a different school out of its house, and a food drive after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New York area, and a shoe drive for Syrian refugees in Jordan. We were ready to do just about anything to get involved. When my wife came in one day to help out in class, she was enlisted as a recess monitor and asked to change the underwear of a boy she didn’t know from another class who’d soiled himself. (Volunteerism had a limit, and that was it.)</p><p>The private school we’d left behind had let parents know they weren’t needed, except as thrilled audiences at performances. But our son’s kindergarten teacher—an eccentric man near retirement age, whose uniform was dreadlocks (he was white), a leather apron, shorts, and sandals with socks—sent out frequent and frankly needy SOS emails. When his class of 28 students was studying the New York shoreline, he enlisted me to help build a replica of an antique cargo ship like the one docked off Lower Manhattan—could I pick up a sheet of plywood, four by eight by 5/8 of an inch, cut in half, along with four appropriate hinges and two dozen plumbing pieces, if they weren’t too expensive? He would reimburse me.</p><p>That first winter, the city’s school-bus drivers called a strike that lasted many weeks. I took turns with a few other parents ferrying a group of kids to and from school. Everyone who needed a ride would gather at the bus stop at 7:30 each morning and we’d figure out which parent could drive that day. Navigating the strike required a flexible schedule and a car, and it put immense pressure on families. A girl in our son’s class who lived in a housing project a mile from the school suddenly stopped attending. Administrators seemed to devote as much effort to rallying families behind the bus drivers’ union as to making sure every child could get to school. That was an early sign of what would come later, of all that would eventually alienate me, and I might have been troubled by it if I hadn’t been so taken with my new role as a public-school father teaming up with other parents to get us through a crisis.</p><h3>4.</h3><p><span class="smallcaps">Parents have one layer</span> of skin too few. They’ve lost an epidermis that could soften bruises and dull panic. In a divided city, in a stratified society, that missing skin—the intensity of every little worry and breakthrough—is the shortest and maybe the only way to intimacy between people who would otherwise never cross paths. Children become a great leveler. Parents have in common the one subject that never ceases to absorb them.</p><p>In kindergarten our son became friends with a boy in class I’ll call Marcus. He had mirthful eyes, a faint smile, and an air of imperturbable calm—he was at ease with everyone, never visibly agitated or angry. His parents were working-class immigrants from the Caribbean. His father drove a sanitation truck, and his mother was a nanny whose boss had been the one to suggest entering Marcus in the school’s lottery—parents with connections and resources knew about the school, while those without rarely did. Marcus’s mother was a quietly demanding advocate for her son, and Marcus was exactly the kind of kid for whom a good elementary school could mean the chance of a lifetime. His family and ours were separated by race, class, and the dozen city blocks that spell the difference between a neighborhood with tree-lined streets, regular garbage collection, and upscale cupcake shops, and a neighborhood with aboveground power lines and occasional shootings. If not for the school, we would never have known Marcus’s family.</p><p>The boys’ friendship would endure throughout elementary school and beyond. Once, when they were still in kindergarten, my wife was walking with them in a neighborhood of townhouses near the school, and Marcus suddenly exclaimed, “Can you imagine having a backyard?” We had a backyard. Our son kept quiet, whether out of embarrassment or an early intuition that human connections require certain omissions. Marcus’s father would drop him off at our house on weekends—often with the gift of a bottle of excellent rum from his home island—or I would pick Marcus up at their apartment building and drive the boys to a batting cage or the Bronx Zoo. They almost always played at our house, seldom at Marcus’s, which was much smaller. This arrangement was established from the start without ever being discussed. If someone had mentioned it, we would have had to confront the glaring inequality in the boys’ lives. I felt that the friendship flourished in a kind of benign avoidance of this crucial fact.</p><p>At school our son fell in with a group of boys who had no interest in joining the lunchtime soccer games. Their freewheeling playground scrums often led to good-natured insults, wrestling matches, outraged feelings, an occasional punch, then reconciliation, until the next day. And they were the image of diversity. Over the years, in addition to our son and Marcus, there was another black boy, another white boy, a Latino boy, a mixed-race boy, a boy whose Latino mother was a teacher’s aide at the school, and an African boy with white lesbian parents. A teacher at the private school had once called our son “anti-authoritarian,” and it was true: He pursued friends who were mildly rebellious, irritants to the teachers and lunch monitors they didn’t like, and he avoided kids who always had their hand up and displayed obvious signs of parental ambition. The anxious meritocrat in me hadn’t completely faded away, and I once tried to get our son to befriend a 9-year-old who was reading <i>Animal Farm</i>, but he brushed me off. He would do this his own way.</p><p>The school’s pedagogy emphasized learning through doing. Reading instruction didn’t start until the end of first grade; in math, kids were taught various strategies for multiplication and division, but the times tables were their parents’ problem. Instead of worksheets and tests, there were field trips to the shoreline and the Noguchi sculpture museum. “Project-based learning” had our son working for weeks on a clay model of a Chinese nobleman’s tomb tower during a unit on ancient China.</p><p>Even as we continued to volunteer, my wife and I never stopped wondering if we had cheated our son of a better education. We got antsy with the endless craft projects, the utter indifference to spelling. But our son learned well only when a subject interested him. “I want to learn facts, not skills,” he told his first-grade teacher. The school’s approach—the year-long second-grade unit on the geology and bridges of New York—caught his imagination, while the mix of races and classes gave him something even more precious: an unselfconscious belief that no one was better than anyone else, that he was everyone’s equal and everyone was his. In this way the school succeeded in its highest purpose.</p><p>And then things began to change.</p><h3>5.</h3><p><span class="smallcaps">Around 2014, </span>a<span class="smallcaps"> </span>new mood germinated in America—at first in a few places, among limited numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapidity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency—out of expectations raised and frustrated, especially among people under 30, which is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short years after the teachers at the private preschool had crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds, hope was gone.</p><p>At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to kneeling during the national anthem—would light a fire that would spread overnight and keep on burning because it was fed by anger at injustices deeper and older than the inflaming incident. Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.</p><p>At points where the ideology touched policy, it demanded, and in some cases achieved, important reforms: body cameras on cops, reduced prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, changes in the workplace. But its biggest influence came in realms more inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we think and imagine and talk and write, and the public spaces where institutions shape the contours of our culture and guard its perimeter.</p><p>Who was driving the new progressivism? Young people, influencers on social media, leaders of cultural organizations, artists, journalists, educators, and, more and more, elected Democrats. You could almost believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be wrong. An <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/?utm_source=feed">extensive survey of American political opinion</a> published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought “political correctness” was a problem. The only exception was a group identified as “progressive activists”—just 8 percent of the population, and likely to be white, well educated, and wealthy. Other polls found that white progressives were readier to embrace diversity and immigration, and to blame racism for the problems of minority groups, than black Americans were. The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.</p><p>Politics becomes most real not in the media but in your nervous system, where everything matters more and it’s harder to repress your true feelings because of guilt or social pressure. It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it.</p><p>Every spring, starting in third grade, public-school students in New York State take two standardized tests geared to the national Common Core curriculum—one in math, one in English. In the winter of 2015–16, our son’s third-grade year, we began to receive a barrage of emails and flyers from the school about the upcoming tests. They all carried the message that the tests were not mandatory. “Inform Yourself!” an email urged us. “Whether or not your child will take the tests is YOUR decision.”</p><p>During the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies, statewide tests were used to improve low-performing schools by measuring students’ abilities, with rewards (“race to the top”) and penalties (“accountability”) doled out accordingly. These standardized tests could determine the fate of teachers and schools. Some schools began devoting months of class time to preparing students for the tests.</p><p>The excesses of “high-stakes testing” inevitably produced a backlash. In 2013, four families at our school, with the support of the administration, kept their kids from taking the tests. These parents had decided that the tests were so stressful for students and teachers alike, consumed so much of the school year with mindless preparation, and were so irrelevant to the purpose of education that they were actually harmful. But even after the city eased the consequences of the tests, the opt-out movement grew astronomically. In the spring of 2014, 250 children were kept from taking the tests.</p><p>The critique widened, too: Educators argued that the tests were structurally biased, even racist, because nonwhite students had the lowest scores. “I believe in assessment—I took tests my whole life and I’ve used assessments as an educator,” one black parent at our school, who graduated from a prestigious New York public high school, told me. “But now I see it all differently. Standardized tests are the gatekeepers to keep people out, and I know exactly who’s at the bottom. It is torturous for black, Latino, and low-income children, because they will never catch up, due to institutionalized racism.”</p><p>Our school became the citywide leader of the new movement; the principal was interviewed by the New York media. Opting out became a form of civil disobedience against a prime tool of meritocracy. It started as a spontaneous, grassroots protest against a wrongheaded state of affairs. Then, with breathtaking speed, it transcended the realm of politics and became a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent.</p><p>We took the school at face value when it said that this decision was ours to make. My wife attended a meeting for parents, billed as an “education session.” But when she asked a question that showed we hadn’t made up our minds about the tests, another parent quickly tried to set her straight. The question was out of place—<i>no one</i> should want her child to take the tests. The purpose of the meeting wasn’t to provide neutral information. Opting out required an action—parents had to sign and return a letter—and the administration needed to educate new parents about the party line using other parents who had already accepted it, because school employees were forbidden to propagandize.</p><p>We weren’t sure what to do. Instead of giving grades, teachers at our school wrote long, detailed, often deeply knowledgeable reports on each student. But we wanted to know how well our son was learning against an external standard. If he took the tests, he would miss a couple of days of class, but he would also learn to perform a basic task that would be part of his education for years to come.</p><p>Something else about the opt-out movement troubled me. Its advocates claimed that the tests penalized poor and minority kids. I began to think that the real penalty might come from not taking them. Opting out had become so pervasive at our school that the Department of Education no longer had enough data to publish the kind of information that prospective applicants had once used to assess the school. In the category of “Student Achievement” the department now gave our school “No Rating.” No outsider could judge how well the school was educating children, including poor, black, and Latino children. The school’s approach left gaps in areas like the times tables, long division, grammar, and spelling. Families with means filled these gaps, as did some families whose means were limited—Marcus’s parents enrolled him in after-school math tutoring. But when a girl at our bus stop fell behind because she didn’t attend school for weeks after the death of her grandmother, who had been the heart of the family, there was no objective measure to act as a flashing red light. In the name of equality, disadvantaged kids were likelier to falter and disappear behind a mist of togetherness and self-deception. Banishing tests seemed like a way to let everyone off the hook. This was the price of dismissing meritocracy.</p><p>I took a sounding of parents at our bus stop. Only a few were open to the tests, and they didn’t say this loudly. One parent was trying to find a way to have her daughter take the tests off school grounds. Everyone sensed that failing to opt out would be unpopular with the principal, the staff, and the parent leaders—the school’s power structure.</p><p>A careful silence fell over the whole subject. One day, while volunteering in our son’s classroom, I asked another parent whether her son would take the tests. She flashed a nervous smile and hushed me—it wasn’t something to discuss at school. One teacher disapproved of testing so intensely that, when my wife and I asked what our son would miss during test days, she answered indignantly, “Curriculum!” Students whose parents declined to opt out would get no preparation at all. It struck me that this would punish kids whom the movement was supposed to protect.</p><p>If orthodoxy reduced dissenters to whispering—if the entire weight of public opinion at the school was against the tests—then, I thought, our son should take them.</p><p>The week of the tests, one of the administrators approached me in the school hallway. “Have you decided?” I told her that our son would take the tests.</p><p>She was the person to whom I’d once written a letter about the ideal match between our values and the school’s, the letter that may have helped get our son off the wait list. Back then I hadn’t heard of the opt-out movement—it didn’t exist. Less than four years later, it was the only truth. I wondered if she felt that I’d betrayed her.</p><p>Later that afternoon we spent an hour on the phone. She described all the harm that could come to our son if he took the tests—the immense stress, the potential for demoralization. I replied with our reason for going ahead—we wanted him to learn this necessary skill. The conversation didn’t feel completely honest on either side: She also wanted to confirm the school’s position in the vanguard of the opt-out movement by reaching 100 percent compliance, and I wanted to refuse to go along. The tests had become secondary. This was a political argument.</p><p>Our son was among the 15 or so students who took the tests. A 95 percent opt-out rate was a resounding success. It rivaled election results in Turkmenistan. As for our son, he finished the tests feeling neither triumphant nor defeated. The issue that had roiled the grown-ups in his life seemed to have had no effect on him at all. He returned to class and continued working on his report about the mountain gorillas of Central Africa.</p><figure><img alt="Illustration of the American flag with gold stars scattered on top" height="929" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/08/PackerOption3_1/60b0dda90.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">Paul Spella</figcaption></figure><h3>6.</h3><p><span class="smallcaps">The battleground </span>of<span class="smallcaps"> </span>the new progressivism is identity. That’s the historical source of exclusion and injustice that demands redress. In the past five years, identity has set off a burst of exploration and recrimination and creation in every domain, from television to cooking. “Identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations about music,” <i>The New York Times Magazine </i>declared in 2017, in the introduction to a special issue consisting of 25 essays on popular songs. “For better or worse, it’s all identity now.”</p><p>The school’s progressive pedagogy had fostered a wonderfully intimate sense of each child as a complex individual. But progressive politics meant thinking in groups. When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity—race, sexuality, disability. I understood the solidarity that could come from these meetings, but I also worried that they might entrench differences that the school, by its very nature, did so much to reduce. Other, less diverse schools in New York, including elite private ones, had taken to dividing their students by race into consciousness-raising “affinity groups.” I knew several mixed-race families that transferred their kids out of one such school because they were put off by the relentless focus on race. Our son and his friends, whose classroom study included slavery and civil rights, hardly ever discussed the subject of race with one another. The school already lived what it taught.</p><p>The bathroom crisis hit our school the same year our son took the standardized tests. A girl in second grade had switched to using male pronouns, adopted the initial Q as a first name, and begun dressing in boys’ clothes. Q also used the boys’ bathroom, which led to problems with other boys. Q’s mother spoke to the principal, who, with her staff, looked for an answer. They could have met the very real needs of students like Q by creating a single-stall bathroom—the one in the second-floor clinic would have served the purpose. Instead, the school decided to get rid of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms altogether. If, as the city’s Department of Education now instructed, schools had to allow students to use the bathroom of their self-identified gender, then getting rid of the labels would clear away all the confusion around the bathroom question. A practical problem was solved in conformity with a new idea about identity.</p><p>Within two years, almost every bathroom in the school, from kindergarten through fifth grade, had become gender-neutral. Where signs had once said <span class="smallcaps">boys</span> and <span class="smallcaps">girls</span>, they now said <span class="smallcaps">students</span>. Kids would be conditioned to the new norm at such a young age that they would become the first cohort in history for whom gender had nothing to do with whether they sat or stood to pee. All that biology entailed—curiosity, fear, shame, aggression, pubescence, the thing between the legs—was erased or wished away.</p><p>The school didn’t inform parents of this sudden end to an age-old custom, as if there were nothing to discuss. Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day. Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals. Our son reported that his classmates, without any collective decision, had simply gone back to the old system, regardless of the new signage: Boys were using the former boys’ rooms, girls the former girls’ rooms. This return to the familiar was what politicians call a “commonsense solution.” It was also kind of heartbreaking. As children, they didn’t think to challenge the new adult rules, the new adult ideas of justice. Instead, they found a way around this difficulty that the grown-ups had introduced into their lives. It was a quiet plea to be left alone.</p><p>When parents found out about the elimination of boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, they showed up en masse at a PTA meeting. The parents in one camp declared that the school had betrayed their trust, and a woman threatened to pull her daughter out of the school. The parents in the other camp argued that gender labels—and not just on the bathroom doors—led to bullying and that the real problem was the patriarchy. One called for the elimination of urinals. It was a minor drama of a major cultural upheaval. The principal, who seemed to care more about the testing opt-out movement than the bathroom issue, explained her financial constraints and urged the formation of a parent-teacher committee to resolve the matter. After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral.</p><p><span class="smallcaps">In politics, identity </span>is an appeal to authority—the moral authority of the oppressed: <i>I am what I am, which explains my view and makes it the truth</i>. The politics of identity starts out with the universal principles of equality, dignity, and freedom, but in practice it becomes an end in itself—often a dead end, a trap from which there’s no easy escape and maybe no desire for escape. Instead of equality, it sets up a new hierarchy that inverts the old, discredited one—a new moral caste system that ranks people by the oppression of their group identity. It makes race, which is a dubious and sinister social construct, an essence that defines individuals regardless of agency or circumstance—as when Representative Ayanna Pressley said, “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice; we don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”</p><p>At times the new progressivism, for all its up-to-the-minuteness, carries a whiff of the 17th century, with heresy hunts and denunciations of sin and displays of self-mortification. The atmosphere of mental constriction in progressive milieus, the self-censorship and fear of public shaming, the intolerance of dissent—these are qualities of an illiberal politics.</p><p>I asked myself if I was moving to the wrong side of a great moral cause because its tone was too loud, because it shook loose what I didn’t want to give up. It took me a long time to see that the new progressivism didn’t just carry my own politics further than I liked. It was actually hostile to principles without which I don’t believe democracy can survive. Liberals are always slow to realize that there can be friendly, idealistic people who have little use for liberal values.</p><h3>7.</h3><p><span class="smallcaps">IN 2016 </span>two<span class="smallcaps"> </span>obsessions claimed our family—<i>Hamilton</i> and the presidential campaign. We listened and sang along to the <i>Hamilton</i> soundtrack every time we got in the car, until the kids had memorized most of its brilliant, crowded, irresistible libretto. Our son mastered Lafayette’s highest-velocity rap, and in our living room he and his sister acted out the climactic duel between Hamilton and Burr. The musical didn’t just teach them this latest version of the revolution and the early republic. It filled their world with the imagined past, and while the music was playing, history became more real than the present. Our daughter, who was about to start kindergarten at our son’s school, wholly identified with the character of Hamilton—she fought his battles, made his arguments, and denounced his enemies. Every time he died she wept.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/lin-manuel-miranda-hamilton/408019/?utm_source=feed">Read: How Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Hamilton’ shapes history</a>]</i></p><p><i>Hamilton</i> and the campaign had a curious relation in our lives. The first acted as a disinfectant to the second, cleansing its most noxious effects, belying its most ominous portents. Donald Trump could sneer at Mexicans and rail against Muslims and kick dirt on everything decent and good, but the American promise still breathed whenever the Puerto Rican Hamilton and the black Jefferson got into a rap battle over the national bank. When our daughter saw pictures of the actual Founding Fathers, she was shocked and a little disappointed that they were white. The only president our kids had known was black. Their experience gave them no context for Trump’s vicious brand of identity politics, which was inflaming the other kinds. We wanted them to believe that America was better than Trump, and <i>Hamilton</i> kept that belief in the air despite the accumulating gravity of facts. Our son, who started fourth grade that fall, had dark premonitions about the election, but when the <i>Access Hollywood </i>video surfaced in October, he sang Jefferson’s gloating line about Hamilton’s sex scandal: “Never gonna be president now!”</p><p>The morning after the election, the kids cried. They cried for people close to us, Muslims and immigrants who might be in danger, and perhaps they also cried for the lost illusion that their parents could make things right. Our son lay on the couch and sobbed inconsolably until we made him go to the bus stop.</p><p>The next time we were in the car, we automatically put on <i>Hamilton</i>. When “Dear Theodosia” came on, and Burr and Hamilton sang to their newborn children, “If we lay a strong enough foundation, we’ll pass it on to you, we’ll give the world to you, and you’ll blow us all away,” it was too much for me and my wife. We could no longer feel the romance of the young republic. It was a long time before we listened to <i>Hamilton</i> again.</p><p>A few weeks after the election, our daughter asked if Trump could break our family apart. She must have gotten the idea from overhearing a conversation about threats to undocumented immigrants. We told her that we were lucky—we had rights as citizens that he couldn’t take away. I decided to sit down with the kids and read the Bill of Rights together. Not all of it made sense, but they got the basic idea—the president wasn’t King George III, the Constitution was stronger than Trump, certain principles had not been abolished—and they seemed reassured.</p><p>Since then it has become harder to retain faith in these truths.</p><p>Our daughter said that she hated being a child, because she felt helpless to do anything. The day after the inauguration, my wife took her to the Women’s March in Midtown Manhattan. She made a sign that said <span class="smallcaps">we have power too</span>, and at the march she sang the one protest song she knew, “We Shall Overcome.” For days afterward she marched around the house shouting, “Show me what democracy looks like!”</p><p>Our son was less given to joining a cause and shaking his fist. Being older, he also understood the difficulty of the issues better, and they depressed him, because he knew that children really could do very little. He’d been painfully aware of climate change throughout elementary school—first grade was devoted to recycling and sustainability, and in third grade, during a unit on Africa, he learned that every wild animal he loved was facing extinction. “What are humans good for besides destroying the planet?” he asked. Our daughter wasn’t immune to the heavy mood—she came home from school one day and expressed a wish not to be white so that she wouldn’t have slavery on her conscience. It did not seem like a moral victory for our children to grow up hating their species and themselves.</p><p>We decided to cut down on the political talk around them. It wasn’t that we wanted to hide the truth or give false comfort—they wouldn’t have let us even if we’d tried. We just wanted them to have their childhood without bearing the entire weight of the world, including the new president we had allowed into office. We owed our children a thousand apologies. The future looked awful, and somehow we expected them to fix it. Did they really have to face this while they were still in elementary school?</p><p>I can imagine the retort—the rebuke to everything I’ve written here: Your privilege has spared them. There’s no answer to that—which is why it’s a potent weapon—except to say that identity alone should neither uphold nor invalidate an idea, or we’ve lost the Enlightenment to pure tribalism. Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.</p><p>I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics. By age 10 he had studied the civilizations of ancient China, Africa, the early Dutch in New Amsterdam, and the Mayans. He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery. But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government. He was given no context for the meaning of freedom of expression, no knowledge of the democratic ideas that Trump was trashing or of the instruments with which citizens could hold those in power accountable. Our son knew about the worst betrayals of democracy, including the one darkening his childhood, but he wasn’t taught the principles that had been betrayed. He got his civics from <i>Hamilton</i>.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/civics-education-helps-form-young-voters-and-activists/572299/?utm_source=feed">Read: Civics education helps create young voters and activists</a>]</i></p><p>The teaching of civics has dwindled since the 1960s—a casualty of political polarization, as the left and the right each accuse the other of using the subject for indoctrination—and with it the public’s basic knowledge about American government. In the past few years, civics has been making a comeback in certain states. As our son entered fifth grade, in the first year of the Trump presidency, no subject would have been more truly empowering.</p><p>Every year, instead of taking tests, students at the school presented a “museum” of their subject of study, a combination of writing and craftwork on a particular topic. Parents came in, wandered through the classrooms, read, admired, and asked questions of students, who stood beside their projects. These days, called “shares,” were my very best experiences at the school. Some of the work was astoundingly good, all of it showed thought and effort, and the coming-together of parents and kids felt like the realization of everything the school aspired to be.</p><p>The fifth-grade share, our son’s last, was different. That year’s curriculum included the Holocaust, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The focus was on “upstanders”—individuals who had refused to be bystanders to evil and had raised their voices. It was an education in activism, and with no grounding in civics, activism just meant speaking out. At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment—sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence. Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.</p><figure><img alt="Illustration of a school desk with gold stars overlaid on top" height="886" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2019/08/PackerOption3NEWW/49f0740ee.jpg" width="672"><figcaption class="credit">Paul Spella</figcaption></figure><h3>8.</h3><p><span class="smallcaps">Students in New <span class="caps">York City</span></span> public schools have to apply to middle school. They rank schools in their district, six or eight or a dozen of them, in order of preference, and the middle schools rank the students based on academic work and behavior. Then a Nobel Prize–winning algorithm matches each student with a school, and that’s almost always where the student has to go. The city’s middle schools are notoriously weak; in our district, just three had a reputation for being “good.” An education expert near us made a decent living by offering counseling sessions to panic-stricken families. The whole process seemed designed to raise the anxiety of 10-year-olds to the breaking point.</p><p>“If you fail a math test you fail seventh grade,” our daughter said one night at dinner, looking years ahead. “If you fail seventh grade you fail middle school, if you fail middle school you fail high school, if you fail high school you fail college, if you fail college you fail life.”</p><p>We were back to the perversions of meritocracy. But the country’s politics had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.</p><p>The middle-school scramble subjected 10- and 11-year-olds to the dictates of meritocracy and democracy at the same time: a furiously competitive contest and a heavy-handed ideology. The two systems don’t coexist so much as drive children simultaneously toward opposite extremes, realms that are equally inhospitable to the delicate, complex organism of a child’s mind. If there’s a relation between the systems, I came to think, it’s this: Wokeness prettifies the success race, making contestants feel better about the heartless world into which they’re pushing their children. Constantly checking your privilege is one way of not having to give it up.</p><p>On the day acceptance letters arrived at our school, some students wept. One of them was Marcus, who had been matched with a middle school that he didn’t want to attend. His mother went in to talk to an administrator about an appeal. The administrator asked her why Marcus didn’t instead go to the middle school that shared a building with our school, that followed the same progressive approach as ours, and that was one of the worst-rated in the state. Marcus’s mother left in fury and despair. She had no desire for him to go to the middle school upstairs.</p><p>Our son got into one of the “good” middle schools. Last September he came home from the first day of school and told us that something was wrong. His classmates didn’t look like the kids in his elementary school. We found a pie chart that broke his new school down by race, and it left him stunned. Two-thirds of the students were white or Asian; barely a quarter were black or Latino. Competitive admissions had created a segregated school.</p><p>His will be the last such class. Two years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a new initiative to integrate New York City’s schools. Our district, where there are enough white families for integration to be meaningful, was chosen as a test case. Last year a committee of teachers, parents, and activists in the district announced a proposal: Remove the meritocratic hurdle that stands in the way of equality. The proposal would get rid of competitive admissions for middle school—grades, tests, attendance, behavior—which largely accounted for the racial makeup at our son’s new school. In the new system, students would still rank their choices, but the algorithm would be adjusted to produce middle schools that reflect the demography of our district, giving disadvantaged students a priority for 52 percent of the seats. In this way, the district’s middle schools would be racially and economically integrated. De Blasio’s initiative was given the slogan “Equity and Excellence for All.” It tried to satisfy democracy and meritocracy in a single phrase.</p><p>I went back and forth and back again, and finally decided to support the new plan. My view was gratuitous, since the change came a year too late to affect our son. I would have been sorely tested if chance had put him in the first experimental class. Under the new system, a girl at his former bus stop got matched with her 12th choice, and her parents decided to send her to a charter school. No doubt many other families will leave the public-school system. But I had seen our son flourish by going to an elementary school that looked like the city. I had also seen meritocracy separate out and demoralize children based on their work in fourth grade. “If you fail middle school,” our daughter said, “you fail life.” It was too soon for children’s fates to be decided by an institution that was supposed to serve the public good.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/internalizing-the-myth-of-meritocracy/535035/?utm_source=feed">Read: Poor kids who believe in meritocracy suffer</a>]</i></p><p>I wanted the plan to succeed, but I had serious doubts. It came festooned with all the authoritarian excess of the new progressivism. It called for the creation of a new diversity bureaucracy, and its relentless jargon squashed my hope that the authors knew how to achieve an excellent education for all. Instead of teaching civics that faced the complex truths of American democracy, “the curriculum will highlight the vast historical contributions of non-white groups &amp; seek to dispel the many non-truths/lies related to American &amp; World History.”</p><p>“Excellence” was barely an afterthought in the plan. Of its 64 action items, only one even mentioned what was likely to be the hardest problem: “Provide support for [district] educators in adopting best practices for academically, racially &amp; socioeconomically mixed classrooms.” How to make sure that children of greatly different abilities would succeed, in schools that had long been academically tracked? How to do it without giving up on rigor altogether—without losing the fastest learners?</p><p>We had faced this problem with our daughter, who was reading far ahead of her grade in kindergarten and begged her teacher for math problems to solve. When the school declined to accommodate her, and our applications to other public schools were unsuccessful, we transferred her to a new, STEM-focused private school rather than risk years of boredom. We regretted leaving the public-school system, and we were still wary of the competitive excesses of meritocracy, but we weren’t willing to abandon it altogether.</p><p>The Department of Education didn’t seem to be thinking about meritocracy at all. Its entire focus was on achieving diversity, and on rooting out the racism that stood in the way of that.</p><p>Late in the summer of 2018, a public meeting was called in our district to discuss the integration plan. It was the height of vacation season, but several hundred parents, including me, showed up. Many had just heard about the new plan, which buried the results of an internal poll showing that a majority of parents wanted to keep the old system. We were presented with a slideshow that included a photo of white adults snarling at black schoolchildren in the South in the 1960s—as if only vicious racism could motivate parents to oppose eliminating an admissions system that met superior work with a more challenging placement. Even if the placement was the fruit of a large historical injustice, parents are compromised; a policy that tells them to set aside their children’s needs until that injustice has been remedied is asking for failure. Just in case the implication of racism wasn’t enough to intimidate dissenters, when the presentation ended, and dozens of hands shot up, one of the speakers, a progressive city-council member, announced that he would take no questions. He waved off the uproar that ensued. It was just like the opt-out “education session” my wife had attended: The deal was done. There was only one truth.</p><aside class="callout-placeholder" data-source="curated"></aside><p>De Blasio’s schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, has answered critics of the diversity initiative by calling them out for racism and refusing to let them “silence” him. As part of the initiative, Carranza has mandated anti-bias training for every employee of the school system, at a cost of $23 million. One training slide was titled “White Supremacy Culture.” It included “Perfectionism,” “Individualism,” “Objectivity,” and “Worship of the Written Word” among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted. In the name of exposing racial bias, the training created its own kind.</p><p>The legacy of racism, together with a false meritocracy in America today that keeps children trapped where they are, is the root cause of the inequalities in the city’s schools. But calling out racism and getting rid of objective standards won’t create real equality or close the achievement gap, and might have the perverse effect of making it worse by driving out families of all races who cling to an idea of education based on real merit. If integration is a necessary condition for equality, it isn’t sufficient. Equality is too important to be left to an ideology that rejects universal values.</p><h3>9.</h3><p><span class="smallcaps">In middle school </span>our son immediately made friends with the same kind of kids who had been his friends in elementary school—outsiders—including Latino boys from the district’s poorest neighborhood. One day he told us about the “N-word passes” that were being exchanged among other boys he knew—a system in which a black kid, bartering for some item, would allow a white kid to use the word. We couldn’t believe such a thing existed, but it did. When one white boy kept using his pass all day long, our son grabbed the imaginary piece of paper and ripped it to shreds. He and his friends heard the official language of moral instruction so often that it became a source of irony and teasing: “Hey, dude, you really need to check your privilege.” When his teacher assigned students to write about how they felt about their identity, letting the class know that whiteness was a source of guilt for her, our son told her that he couldn’t do it. The assignment was too personal, and it didn’t leave enough space for him to describe all that made him who he was.</p><p>“Isn’t school for learning math and science and reading,” he asked us one day, “not for teachers to tell us what to think about society?” He was responding as kids do when adults keep telling them what to think. He had what my wife called unpoliticized empathy.</p><p>Watching your children grow up gives you a startlingly vivid image of the world you’re going to leave them. I can’t say I’m sanguine. Some days the image fills me with dread. That pragmatic genius for which Americans used to be known and admired, which included a talent for educating our young—how did it desert us? Now we’re stewing in anxiety and anger, feverish with bad ideas, too absorbed in our own failures to spare our children. But one day the fever will break, and by then they’ll be grown, and they will have to discover for themselves how to live together in a country that gives every child an equal chance.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/JgEwPDDrl_0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>George Packerhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/george-packer/?utm_source=feedPaul SpellaWhen the Culture War Comes for the Kids2019-09-13T06:00:00-04:002019-09-13T07:46:39-04:00Caught between a brutal meritocracy and a radical new progressivism, a parent tries to do right by his children while navigating New York City’s schools.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597982<p dir="ltr">“Italians,” the great 20th-century Italian writer Ennio Flaiano once remarked, “always rush to the aid of the victor.” But what happens when there’s no clear victor? Or no coherent ideological line between government and opposition? Then where do you run?</p><p dir="ltr">Flaiano’s line has come to mind lately as we’ve watched Italy shift its tone and focus to adjust to a new reality: its <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/italy-political-crisis/597046/?utm_source=feed">recent switch</a> from a right-wing government to a leftish one, one with the same anti-establishment party, the Five Star Movement, at its core, and the same prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, at its head.</p><p>Much <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/world/europe/italy-conte-government-salvini.html">has been made</a> of how Conte has taken the time-honored Italian tradition of <em>trasformismo</em>—switching allegiances depending on how the wind blows—to entirely new dimensions. But it’s been particularly fascinating to observe how the press has changed its tone.</p><p dir="ltr">Coverage of Matteo Salvini has been instructive: The leader of the right-wing, nativist League party was riding high in the polls—and in the media—until he brought down the government last month in a bid for early elections, and failed, at least for now, after his rivals teamed up to block him. In the 15 months in which Salvini was interior minister, he had taken up all the media oxygen in the country with his constant campaigning, his Donald-Trump-inspired calls for “Italians First,” and his more-than-harsh stance on immigration—<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-italy/italys-salvini-blocks-own-coastguard-ship-with-migrants-on-board-idUSKCN1UL27I">blocking ports</a> so ships that had rescued migrants at sea couldn’t dock, and passing new security measures that further criminalized boats that rescued migrants. (The new government may roll back elements of the legislation.)</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/09/matteo-salvini-italy-populist-playbook/597298/?utm_source=feed">Read: The new populist playbook</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">All Italian governments generally help dictate the line of the state-run news broadcaster, the RAI, and through the latest government, Italian television news was led by stories of immigrants, often people of color, who had committed crimes. This also seeped into newspaper coverage, which has less of an impact in shaping public opinion but has always been a barometer of power dynamics and business interests. This is not new: During the nearly two decades that Silvio Berlusconi dominated Italy in three stints as prime minister, he too set the agenda of much of the RAI.</p><p dir="ltr">Yet it was the Italian press and, perhaps more importantly, his private television channels which were key in cultivating the viewership that then became his electorate. Berlusconi’s channels were also crucial to helping Salvini.</p><p dir="ltr">When it seemed Salvini was on the way up, when he seemed to stand a chance of coming to power, powerful commentators were cautious with him, and respectful. Two days before elections for the European Parliament in May, a friendly host on a Berlusconi-owned channel <a href="https://www.mediasetplay.mediaset.it/video/pomeriggiocinque/venerdi-24-maggio_F309209201017101">interviewed Salvini</a>, gushing that he looked very healthy and suntanned, effectively letting him give a campaign speech, and didn’t ask him any hard questions. As they were wrapping up, he handed her a rosary—part of a campaign strategy to win over devout Catholic voters.</p><p dir="ltr">After Salvini’s party placed first in those elections, with 34 percent of the vote, Maurizio Costanzo, one of Italy’s most famous television hosts, also on a Berlusconi channel, had Salvini <a href="https://www.facebook.com/salviniofficial/videos/matteo-salvini-al-maurizio-costanzo-show-canale-5-28032019/325072308212149/">on his show</a>, and let him talk about how he’d gained weight on the campaign trail. Costanzo’s has never been a confrontational show, but still, he didn’t call Salvini out on any of his statements about how the European Union was subjugating Italy or how Europe ran the risk of being “replaced” by immigrants.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link" dir="ltr"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/does-tv-makes-you-dumber-and-more-populist/593287/?utm_source=feed">Read: The More You Watch TV, The More You Vote Populist</a>]</i></p><p dir="ltr">Italians have a pretty astute sense of how to interpret the media—or they did when it was clear who was in Berlusconi’s camp and who wasn’t. Things are more complicated today with the populists, who see themselves as part of a post-ideological landscape in which they have no use for the mainstream press. They prefer to use social media to communicate with the people directly, so the only way to get access as a “mainstream” journalist is to basically embed within the parties and drink the Kool-Aid, or as much of it as you can bear. Which isn’t great for democracy.</p><p dir="ltr">It’s not surprising that perhaps the most significant piece of reporting to emerge during Salvini’s tenure didn’t appear in an Italian publication. <em>BuzzFeed News</em> published <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertonardelli/matteo-salvini-russia-inquiry">a scoop</a> with audio recordings of a secret meeting last fall in Moscow between associates of Salvini, discussing an energy deal that allegedly would have funneled money to the League, in violation of Italian campaign-finance laws. The deal didn’t happen, but Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation. (Italy’s <em>Espresso</em>, a center-left weekly magazine, <a href="http://espresso.repubblica.it/inchieste/2019/02/20/news/esclusivo-lega-milioni-russia-1.331835">broke the story</a> in February, but <em>BuzzFeed</em> had the audio.)</p><p dir="ltr">Yet the following day, a prominent columnist in Italy’s leading daily, <em>Corriere della Sera</em>, wrote of how the League leaders “understandably” wanted to sue <em>BuzzFeed</em> for defamation. And he hinted, <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.it/entry/lavvocato-del-declino_it_5d6790d2e4b01fcc690f3db8">as other commentators have done</a>, that the scoop might have had the fingerprints of intelligence agencies from other European countries. While Salvini was ascending, another columnist at <em>Corriere</em> often <a href="https://www.corriere.it/opinioni/18_giugno_23/dominio-capitano-leghista-0e5372a4-7654-11e8-891d-7017f1270990_preview.shtml?reason=unauthenticated&amp;cat=1&amp;cid=JVP9Xqep&amp;pids=FR&amp;credits=1&amp;origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.corriere.it%2Fopinioni%2F18_giugno_23%2Fdominio-capitano-leghista-0e5372a4-7654-11e8-891d-7017f1270990.shtml">referred to him</a> as “Il Capitano,” or “the captain,” the same term of endearment used by his fans. Once Salvini had fallen, or committed “political suicide,” as one columnist put it, the paper’s tone shifted and it was more openly critical of Salvini.</p><p dir="ltr"><em>Corriere</em> is the same paper that in 2009 buried the first inklings of a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/world/europe/24italy.html">Berlusconi sex scandal</a> deep inside, far off the front pages, and didn’t write anything decisively critical of Berlusconi until it was clear that he was definitely out of power. Only the center-left <em>La Repubblica</em> was openly critical of his government. But the debate was seen as tribal and partisan, less about the common good. That mentality persists today. Whose side are you on? Which winner will you run to? The battle lines are harder to discern, and so everyone, including the press, is running in circles.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/mVOLrLonrQ8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Rachel Donadiohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/rachel-donadio/?utm_source=feedYara Nardi / ReutersMatteo Salvini reacts as Giuseppe Conte addresses Italy's parliament.Italy’s Populists Lost Power—And Now the Press2019-09-13T05:05:49-04:002019-09-13T12:41:31-04:00Much of the Italian press gushed over the far-right leader Matteo Salvini as he rose. Now that he is in opposition, it feels free to be more critical.https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/09/matteo-salvini-italy-press-media/597982/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597994<p>Joe Biden had to know the question was coming.</p><p>In each Democratic debate so far, the former vice president has faced <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/joe-biden-vs-kamala-harris-bussing-and-race-issues/592912/?utm_source=feed">tough questions about his position on desegregating schools via busing,</a> and tonight in Houston was no different. The moderator Linsey Davis noted that Biden had told a reporter in 1975 that he did not feel responsible for what people did 300 years ago. “As you stand here tonight, what responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?” Davis asked.</p><p>That phrasing was actually a gift—a chance for Biden to pivot away from the sticky specifics of busing and make a lofty statement about race. But Biden didn’t take it.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/joe-biden-vs-kamala-harris-bussing-and-race-issues/592912/?utm_source=feed">David A. Graham: ‘I’m sorry. My time is up.’</a>]</i></p><p>Instead, he offered a bizarre, rambling, and incoherent answer that barely responded to Davis, mixing racial justice, education policy, and a healthy dose of who-knows-what. The dizzying nature of the reply can only be grasped by reading it in full:</p><blockquote>
<p>Look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Red lining, banks, making sure we are in a position where—look, you talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title I schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the equal raise of getting out of the $60,000 level. Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are—I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have to make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds go to school—school, not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes with parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help; they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television— excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone—make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school—a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.</p>
</blockquote><p dir="ltr">That’s a word salad even Sarah Palin would have hesitated to serve. Each individual component made some sense in isolation, even the line about playing the radio or TV: Experts say it’s useful for children to hear spoken language to help them develop their own. But the way Biden phrased it, complete with an archaic mention of record players, just reinforced the overall incoherence and randomness of his response.</p><p dir="ltr">That’s an especially serious problem because there’s another question that Biden knew was coming Thursday, though it was mostly posed through passive-aggressive comments: Is he simply too old and off his game to be the Democratic presidential nominee? Rambling rants about turntables certainly don’t help put such concerns to rest.</p><p dir="ltr">But Biden didn’t stop there. Perhaps he sensed how poorly the answer had gone and was flailing, but he then decided to answer several foreign-policy questions that had been asked of his rivals earlier in the night.</p><p dir="ltr">“No, I’m going to go like the rest of them do, twice over,” he said when the moderators tried to stop him—the flash of anger a rare break in his unfailing politesse on the debate stage.</p><p dir="ltr">“By the way, in Venezuela, we should be allowing people to come here from Venezuela. I know [President Nicolás] Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro. Number two, you talk about the need to do something in Latin America. I’m the guy that came up with $740 million, to see to it those three countries, in fact, changed their system so people don’t have a chance to leave. You’re all acting like we just discovered this yesterday.”</p><p dir="ltr">Now Biden wasn’t just rambling—he was the angry old man demanding his rivals, and the moderators, get off his lawn. It was a disastrous answer. Nor was that the only time on Thursday when Biden seemed to be spinning his wheels as he searched for an answer.</p><p dir="ltr">Biden faced other tough jabs from his opponents throughout the night. Most pointedly, Julián Castro accused Biden of forgetting a statement about health care. “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?” Castro said, not very subtly broaching the age question. “Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? I can’t believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy in and now you’re saying they don’t have to buy in. You’re forgetting that.”</p><p dir="ltr">(As <em>New York</em>’s Adam K. Raymond <a href="http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/castro-attacks-biden-debate.html">pointed out</a>, though, it was Castro who was mistaken—and Biden who’d been consistent.)</p><p dir="ltr">Will any of this matter? It’s anyone’s guess, but the evidence so far suggests it might not. There’s an active conversation about whether Biden simply isn’t up to the job, especially in the press, but so far his polling has remained remarkably durable. While there’s heavy churn among his rivals, with the field starting to sort out into some clear tiers, Biden has consistently led by a wide margin. Yet he also cannot put the questions to rest, and with every episode like his record scratch giving more ammunition to doubters, the risk is that the accumulation of missteps starts to drag his numbers down.</p><p dir="ltr">If there is one silver lining for Biden, it’s that the misstep came near the end of the debate. Just a few minutes later, he was the first candidate to answer a question about overcoming adversity, and he talked about the death of his wife and daughter in a car crash just after he was elected senator, and the death of his son Beau Biden from brain cancer in 2015. These are tales that Biden has told before, and he tells them well and movingly.</p><p>“We’ve all went through that, in some form or another,” Biden said. “For me, the way I’ve dealt with it is finding purpose. And my purpose is to do what I’ve always tried to do and stay engaged in public policy, but there’s a lot of people that have gone through a lot worse than I have get up every single morning, put their feet one foot in front of the other, the real heroes out there.”</p><p>That answer goes a long way to showing why the former vice president remains so popular with so many Democratic voters. It was Biden at his grandfatherly best—just moments after Biden at his grandfatherly worst.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/wHVMacPZS5o" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>David A. Grahamhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-a-graham/?utm_source=feedMike Blake / ReutersBiden’s Broken-Record Moment2019-09-12T23:19:22-04:002019-09-13T13:21:10-04:00Faced with a question on segregation, the vice president skipped a track.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/bidens-broken-record-moment/597994/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597958<p><em>They’re coming to take your guns away</em>. That’s the line conservatives have long used as a scare tactic in the United States gun debate. (It’s the go-to hyperbole for the National Rifle Association.) Democrats have always contorted themselves to dodge this specific claim, afraid of legal challenges in the long term and, in the near term, alienating moderate voters who care about their Second Amendment rights. But former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas is no longer shying away from this charge.</p><p>“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke said during the third presidential debate in Houston tonight. “We’re not going to allow it to be used against a fellow American anymore.”</p><p>O’Rourke is a solidly second-tier candidate in the Democratic primary race: He has consistently <a href="https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-primaries/democratic/national/">won roughly 2 to 3 percent of voters </a>surveyed in national polls. Nevertheless, he may have a distinctive role to play in the coming months. After his hometown of El Paso, Texas, was hit by <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/mass-shooting-christian-response/595522/?utm_source=feed">a deadly mass shooting in a Walmart</a>, the former congressman has pivoted his 2020 campaign to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/beto-orourke-says-the-el-paso-shooting-changed-him/597895/?utm_source=feed">focus primarily on guns</a>. His impassioned arguments for gun control, born from his lived experience of leaving the campaign trail to sit with the victims of gun violence and their families, may set the Democratic conversation around guns, not least because O’Rourke’s competitors seem eager to hand him the mic and listen.</p><p><cite><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/beto-orourke-says-the-el-paso-shooting-changed-him/597895/?utm_source=feed">[Read: Beto O’Rourke has a new case to make to voters]</a></cite></p><p>Guns came up early in tonight’s debate, in part because the issue has been on people’s minds lately: The early-August El Paso shooting devastated the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/08/after-el-paso-shooting-fear-deportation-persists/595441/?utm_source=feed">largely Hispanic</a> Catholic community on the border, while <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/31/us/odessa-shootings.html">twin shootings in Midland and Odessa</a> left seven people dead and at least 21 injured just a couple of weeks ago. Tonight, as candidates began discussing their plans to end America’s seemingly endless spree of mass shootings, something remarkable happened: Again and again, they turned to O’Rourke, commending him on how he has handled the aftermath of the latest violence in his home state.</p><p>The moderator then turned to O’Rourke. In a question about O’Rourke’s proposed gun-buyback program, the moderator spoke directly to conservatives’ central fear: that gun-reform proposals are really just an excuse for the government to get rid of Americans’ guns. So, O’Rourke was asked, “Are you proposing taking away their guns?”</p><p>The former congressman was unapologetic. “I am,” he said, “if it’s a weapon that was designed to kill people on a battlefield.” And there may be room for compromise, he said: Attendees at a recent gun show he visited in Conway, Arkansas, were open to his proposals to limit the distribution of weapons such as AR-15s. “Let’s do the right thing,” he said, and “bring everyone in America into the conversation—Republicans, Democrats, gun owners, and non-gun-owners alike.”</p><p dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/06/22/americas-complex-relationship-with-guns/">According to public-opinion polling,</a> O’Rourke is right, at least to an extent: Strong majorities of Americans from both parties, including those who own guns and those who don’t, agree on policies like implementing basic background checks, although there’s less consensus on banning “assault-style weapons” and high-capacity magazines. So far in this Democratic primary race, as in his failed bid to become a U.S. senator in 2018, O’Rourke has not been a consensus-focused candidate; he has tried to appeal to the left.</p><p dir="ltr">O’Rourke’s experience in El Paso may have permanently shifted his presidential bid, and perhaps his political career. When he speaks about this issue, he appears to speak from the heart. The Democratic presidential candidates agree that they have to do something about how guns are bought and sold in America. In the end, O’Rourke may not make it to the White House, but on this issue, he may lead the way.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/NENOlYt5fbc" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Emma Greenhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/emma-green/?utm_source=feedWin McNamee / GettyBeto O’Rourke’s Attempt to Shift the Overton Window on Guns2019-09-12T22:09:36-04:002019-09-13T14:25:14-04:00How Beto O’Rourke, a firmly second-tier candidate in the 2020 race, may move the Democratic conversation on guns after tonight’s debate in Houstonhttps://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/beto-orourke-take-ar-15s/597958/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597991<p>Those who thought the Democrats resembled an undifferentiated mass of nice people who love low deductibles were treated to some fireworks during tonight’s debate. It was the first time the Democrats started seriously attacking one another since the debates first began, in June. And the ground they chose to do battle on was an expected one: health care.</p><p>The evening struck an early snarky note when Mayor Pete Buttigieg gave Andrew Yang side-eye for promising to give away 10 of his “freedom dividends”—otherwise known as $1,000—through an <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/andrew-yang-120000-giveaway-for-ubi-pilot-program-1493622">online raffle</a>. “It’s original, I’ll give you that,” Buttigieg said dryly after Yang made the announcement.</p><p>Once the health-care segment got under way, the gloves came off and the knives came out. Health care is one of the most important issues for Democratic voters, and the candidates used it to rile one another up, snipe at their differences, and eventually even debate how mean they should be to one another in the first place.</p><p>Joe Biden highlighted the fact that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/06/elizabeth-warren-health-care-democratic-debate/592693/?utm_source=feed">his health-care plan</a>, which would allow Americans to keep their private health insurance, would be cheaper than either Senator Elizabeth Warren’s or Senator Bernie Sanders’s. Warren responded with, “I’ve actually never met anybody who likes their health-insurance company,” a retort to the common claim that her plan would yank away insurance plans people are already happy with. Sanders followed up later by saying, “Maybe you’ve run into people who <em>loooove </em>their premiums.” Could <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/09/friends-25-prescience-chandler-bing-job/597829/?utm_source=feed">he </a><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/09/friends-25-prescience-chandler-bing-job/597829/?utm_source=feed"><em>be</em></a> any more ready for single-payer?</p><p>Senator Amy Klobuchar then went in on Sanders’s token line from a previous debate: that he “wrote the damn bill” on Medicare for All. “While Bernie wrote the bill, I read the bill, and on page 8, it says that we will no longer have private insurance as we know it,” Klobuchar said with a sly grin. Buttigieg then jumped into the fray, saying, “The damn bill that [Sanders] wrote, and that Senator Warren backs … doesn’t trust the American people.”</p><p>The digs became more personal from there. Biden attacked Sanders directly for his leftist politics, saying, “Let me tell you something: For a Socialist, you have a lot more confidence in corporate America than I do.”</p><p>It all crescendoed with Julian Castro saying Biden’s plan would require a buy-in, while his own would not. “They do not have to buy in! They do not have to buy in!” Biden shouted in response.</p><p>“You just said that two minutes ago!” Castro said, adding what might have been a jab at Biden’s age: “Are you forgetting what you said two minutes ago?”</p><p>It makes sense that the candidates would let their major schisms play out in the health-care space. It’s one of the few domains in which their views reflect a total difference in kind, rather than in degree. The next question was about racism, which nearly everyone agrees is bad. But the Democrats fundamentally disagree on what to do about health care in America. Biden and a few others want to improve on Obamacare, while Warren and Sanders want to completely overhaul the system and replace it with U.K.-style single-payer. The vision that prevails will affect Americans’ lives in sweeping ways.</p><p>Plus, perhaps they’ve learned from the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/trump-dynasty/596674/?utm_source=feed">winner of the 2016 election</a> that the nice guy doesn’t always finish first in politics. The Democrats are willing to try to get through to voters—even if it’s by using brashness and sarcasm.</p><p>After the tense exchange between Castro and Biden, Buttigieg raced in to be the civility police: “This is why presidential debates are becoming unwatchable,” he said. “This reminds everybody of what they cannot stand about Washington.”</p><p>“That’s called the Democratic-primary election, Pete,” Castro retorted.</p><p>That it is, and if tonight is a guide, it’s heating way up.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/htUrIwcZTo0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Olga Khazanhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/olga-khazan/?utm_source=feedWin McNamee / GettyThe Health-Care Debate Gets Nasty2019-09-12T22:09:00-04:002019-09-12T22:27:32-04:00In the latest Democratic presidential debate, the candidates stopped being polite and started getting real.https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/september-12-democratic-debate-health-care/597991/?utm_source=feedtag:theatlantic.com,2019:50-597961<p>For the fourth time in three presidential debates, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts in Houston on Thursday faced a variation of the same question from a moderator: Will she raise taxes on the middle class to fund Medicare for All?</p><p>And for the fourth time, Warren deployed what in politics is known as an artful dodge. She didn’t say yes, and she didn’t say no. “Those at the very top, the richest individuals and the biggest corporations, are going to pay more,” she told the moderator George Stephanopoulos. “And middle-class families are going to pay less. That’s how this is going to work.”</p><p>Stephanopoulos dutifully followed up: “Direct question,” he said. “You said middle-class families are going to pay less. Will middle-class taxes go up to pay for the program?”</p><p>Again, Warren deflected. “What families have to deal with is cost, total cost. That’s what they have to deal with,” she replied. “What we’re talking about here is what’s going to happen in families’ pockets, what’s going to happen in their budgets. And the answer is Medicare for All. Costs are going to go up for wealthier individuals, and costs are going to go up for giant corporations. But for hard-working families across this country, costs are going to go down, and that’s how it should work under Medicare for All in our health-care system.”</p><p>The exchange was familiar, because Warren had answered a pair of similar questions in a similar way from CNN’s Jake Tapper at the last Democratic debate, in Detroit.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/2020-candidates-president-guide/582598/?utm_source=feed">Read: The 2020 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet</a>]</i></p><p>The word <em>taxes</em> appeared nowhere in her answers, and that’s a clue that yes, taxes for the middle class may be going up under Warren’s plan, which she has adopted from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. What she’s arguing is that any increase in taxes will be more than offset by the reduction in costs that people will have to pay for health care under a government-run system. Premiums will be much lower; deductibles will be much lower; the price of medication will be lower. So what, Warren is suggesting, if middle-class families have to pay a bit more up front if their overall financial burden is going down? But for now, she’s shying away from outlining the trade-off explicitly.</p><p>The distinction she is trying to make may seem wonky, but it goes to the heart of the risky politics that Democrats have long had to navigate in proposing major expansions to government services, and nowhere more so than in health care. Back in 1992, then–Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/18/us/clinton-s-economic-plan-campaign-gambling-that-tax-cut-promise-was-not-taken.html">told voters he would not raise taxes to pay for his programs</a>, but he pointedly declined to repeat the infamous “Read my lips; no new taxes” pledge that President George H. W. Bush made four years earlier and later broke. Ultimately, Clinton did raise taxes on the middle class.</p><p data-id="injected-recirculation-link"><i>[<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/electability-democratic-2020-primary-biden-warren-trump/596137/?utm_source=feed">Read: A nation of pundits</a>]</i></p><p>Over the years since, Democratic presidential candidates from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton have clung to an unspoken rule: Proposals to raise taxes on the rich are okay, but tax increases on the middle class are out—or at least not acknowledged.</p><p>Warren is running on bold ideas, and climbing in the polls as something of a truth teller. At the debate in Detroit, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/warren-democrats-fear-trump/595069/?utm_source=feed">she railed against “small ideas and spinelessness,”</a> and she implored her fellow Democrats not to be afraid of, or adopt, Republican attacks on Medicare for All. But she is facing competition from an even more candid rival in Sanders, who has said that middle-class taxes might have to rise to pay for truly universal health care.</p><p>Her reluctance to acknowledge as much is a sign both of her evolution as a politician and her standing in the Democratic race. Warren’s rising in the polls now, and she likely has at least one eye on the general election next year. And while she’s betting that the country is ready for a real debate on government-run health care, she’s sticking to her party’s age-old wariness of telling middle-class families in a simple sound bite that their tax bill might go up.</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~4/Rp7d6PaH8r0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>Russell Bermanhttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/russell-berman/?utm_source=feedGretchen Ertl / ReutersThe Question Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Want to Answer2019-09-12T21:39:27-04:002019-09-13T10:01:22-04:00The senator from Massachusetts’s artful dodge on middle-class taxes reflects an age-old wariness in the Democratic Party.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/elizabeth-warren-health-care-plan/597961/?utm_source=feed